What makes a good learning management system?

Explore what will make a good learning management system for your organisation’s needs.

Are you trying to find a good learning management system to deliver your L&D programme effectively? Every organisation has different requirements and expectations when choosing an LMS. Despite that, the factors that make a good learning management system are relatively consistent no matter what those requirements happen to be.

In this article, we will detail some key considerations to help you find the right learning management system for your needs.

Flexibility

Something that all good learning management systems have in common is flexibility: the ability to customise and personalise the platform to meet each of your organisation’s unique needs. You need an e-learning platform that will support you in fulfilling those requirements in a simple, intuitive and cost-effective way.  

Having to bend those requirements to fit a rigid piece of technology that doesn’t quite do what you need it to do will ultimately frustrate you and your learners.

Features

While we put the flexibility to do whatever you need at the top of this list, it’s always useful if a learning management system has all or many of your top priority  features and functionality already included. 

That makes life easier by giving you fewer things to customise or develop. It also suggests that the LMS you’re considering was designed with an organisation like yours in mind.

Accessibility

It doesn’t matter how many features or how much flexibility a learning management system has if your learners can’t use it. A good learning management system will always be built to the highest accessibility standards to ensure it can be used by all learners.

Yes, this means ensuring it’s accessible to learners with disabilities or specific needs, but it also means providing a positive user experience for all. Use our LMS accessibility checklist to make sure any platform you’re considering is accessible for your learners.

User experience

We said about accessibility that a good LMS offers a positive user experience for all. It’s worth emphasising the importance of user experience. Considered UX design, navigation and user journeys have a huge impact on how well a learning platform engages your learners.

Using your LMS should feel easy, intuitive and frictionless. Get some more ideas on how to improve LMS user experience. 

Mobile-readiness

Just like a good website, a good learning management system needs to work just as well on mobile as it does on desktop. It makes sense to empower learners to complete courses at a time and place that suits them — and that will often be on their phones.

Look for a learning management system with a native mobile app or a smooth, responsive experience across all devices.

Scalability

A good learning management system should grow with your organisation. You shouldn’t have to pay for user numbers, storage space or extended features you don’t currently need, but you should be able to build your LMS with the confidence that you can scale up in key areas when required.

Safety and security

Your LMS should be a safe and secure environment for admins, educators and learners. It should also protect your organisation from cybersecurity threats and other risks. This will involve the LMS being built and updated to maintain security, while also offering the flexibility for your organisation to put its own LMS security measures in place.

Reporting

The real proof that you’ve chosen a good learning management system will come once the platform is being used. For that reason, you will need a powerful reporting system that can track the progress your learners are making and prove the value of the LMS to your organisation.

Cost-effectiveness

Everything we’ve discussed is vital to your learning management system’s success. But they all ultimately depend on your budget. That’s why an LMS is defined by its cost-effectiveness. It must perform as needed within your budget or provide such value or resource savings that you can justify extending your budget.

What this looks like in practice will vary between different organisations but avoiding traditional, long-term software licensing arrangements will deliver better value.

Ready to find a good learning management system?

Discover some of the learning management systems we work with because they meet all the criteria discussed in this article for our customers.

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