How to build an LMS enrolment strategy

Build an LMS enrolment strategy to make it as easy as possible to get your learners signed up for the right courses.

We’ve previously looked at ways in which you can improve access to your LMS for learners. But once your learners are signed up to your LMS, how do they go about enrolling on relevant courses? To decide that you will need to set an LMS enrolment strategy.

There are two main approaches to an LMS enrolment strategy:

• Direct enrolment: you allocate to learners the courses they need to complete.
• Self-directed enrolment: your learners decide which courses they want to complete and enrol accordingly.

Direct enrolment and self-directed enrolment might be combined within your LMS enrolment strategy, but for now we’ll look at each approach separately.

Direct LMS enrolment strategy

A direct LMS enrolment strategy is a great way of ensuring all learners complete compliance or mandatory training relevant to their role. Your learning and development or HR team may carry out training needs analysis (TNA) to determine which learning needs to be allocated to users in particular roles. Training needs analysis is a process that identifies gaps between the employee training currently available and the training needs of your organisation. The purpose is to determine the most cost effective means of filling the training gaps identified within the analysis.

To do this effectively, your team will need to know and understand the different types of users who will be accessing your LMS and their learning requirements.

Allocating the right learning to the right users could be achieved by using details from their profile. This could be a job assignment reflecting their role or a custom user profile field. Using dynamic rules (Moodle Workplace), dynamic audiences (Totara) or third-party modules such as Profile Cohort (Moodle), each learner is enrolled on the required courses. In the case of Moodle Workplace and Totara, your dynamic rules/audiences may also assign programs or certifications as required learning.

A direct LMS enrolment strategy could also be created using integrations. This could be achieved through integrating an LMS and CRM or integrating an LMS and HR system. But it is most commonly used in the education sector, where an integration with the institution’s student management system allows for students to be directly enrolled on modules or courses that are part of their curriculum. This integration may involve standard web service APIs, database or flat file enrolment, or a custom plugin.

Self-directed LMS enrolment strategy

A self-directed LMS enrolment strategy takes the burden of allocating the right learners to the right courses off your organisation and gives responsibility to the individual learner. As we’ve already established, there are circumstances (mandatory training and compliance) where that might not be the best option.

In other cases, it empowers learners to take control of their learning and to follow their personal or professional interests.

For this LMS enrolment strategy to succeed, you will need to provide a course catalogue that can be easily searched and filtered by your learners. The quality of the metadata and tags will be crucial in ensuring learners can find what they’re looking for. Totara Learn’s catalogue is useful in this regard.

Self-directed enrolment also presents the opportunity to ask users to pay to enrol on courses. This could involve PayPal enrolment or enrolment via other payment gateway plugins, such as Stripe, via a third-party plugin. Learn more about LMS e-commerce options.

Talk to us about your LMS enrolment strategy

If you’ve still got questions about creating an LMS enrolment strategy, feel free to get in touch. Just fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you for a chat.

Tags