29 May 2023
Make LMS automation work for you
Kenny McCormack
Senior Solutions Architect
How LMS automation cuts your overheads and helps you to get more from your site.
Budget and resources are in high demand for most learning and development teams. Labour-intensive manual tasks are often a major drain on both of those things. That’s why LMS automation can play a significant role in cutting cost and resource overheads.
These manual tasks are often very important but also extremely time-consuming. Automating them saves money and frees up resources for more ambitious, forward-thinking work.
With that in mind, here are five LMS automation ideas that will help you to become more efficient and to make your time, budget and resources stretch further.
HR import
By integrating your HR system and your LMS, you can remove duplication and automate processes around adding and removing users. This automation can also be used to mirror your organisation’s structure and to automate learning pathways.
This can be easily achieved in Totara by using the HR import functionality. The same automation can be achieved on Moodle and Moodle Workplace by using an API or plugin.
Scheduled reporting
Manually compiling and sending reports to various department heads and stakeholders can be another drain on time and resources. By scheduling reports to automatically send to the right people at the right time, you can streamline the reporting process dramatically.
Scheduled reports — also known as push reports — features allow you to do this in Totara TXP, Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace.
Dynamic rules
A key part of LMS automation is being able to automate key actions based on the attributes of each user. Totara’s audience rules and Moodle’s dynamic rules features make that easy.
Simply create rules that deliver the required output from the audience in question. That might be assigning learning, sending reminders or deleting users. If you can narrow the audience down to a profile field — such as joining data, job title or department — or an attribute of their learning — such as certification has expired — you can target the people you need to reach quickly and precisely.
Centralised notifications
Sometimes you need to get the same message to a lot of people as quickly as possible. Traditionally, this has meant a lot of copying, pasting and repeating — but that doesn’t have to be the case any longer.
With Totara’s centralised notifications, you can create a single notification message and send it LMS-wide. The notifications can be sent by email, in-app or automatically added to each learner’s tasks or alerts.
Schedule user deletions
Staying on top of user management and offboarding can be laborious. With automation, it’s far easier to manage data. You can also achieve the outcomes you need far more quickly.
Integrating your LMS with your HR system — as we suggested in point 1 — will cut out the duplication. You can automatically delete users from your LMS when they are deleted from your HR system. Totara’s schedule user deletion functionality gives you even more options for handling and purging data, such as retaining data for a specified period and then automatically deleting it. This helps to ensure compliance with specific data protection laws or company policies.
Talk to us about LMS automation
If you’re looking for ways to speed up some of the administrative tasks that soak up your time and budget, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch with you to discuss increasing the level of automation on your LMS.
