What is LMS and Its Benefits?

If you’re new to employee training, the essential tool that will be your knight in shining armor is known as a Learning Management System or an LMS. It is a learning solution that allows you to create and upload, implement, and manage, as well as distribute online training programs, effectively.

LMS offers all the essential features that are required to facilitate instructors and training managers in conducting standardized training programs with organized efficiency and trusted consistency.

Learning Management Systems are specifically designed to create ease the learning process and enable students to nurture their learning with greater convenience. The major benefits of an LMS for students are:

• Easy and efficient sharing of class resources
• Enabling diversity in assessments by offering different formats to cater to the unique needs of learners.
• Improving task organization through useful integrations with other applications.
• Diversifying resource formats to present learning content in an engaging manner. 
• Providing flexible and independent Access to the learning program.

Like any software, LMS will come some disadvantages, but the benefits typically outweigh the drawbacks of LMS. The benefits of LMSs go beyond easier course management. A well-chosen LMS coupled with a robust L&D strategy can have rippling effects not just on your training programs but also on your entire company, as we’ll see below.

• Designing Engaging Class Courses

You can easily combine text, images, and video in a learning management system. Which you cannot on paper. Through the use of more engaging material, your students will keep their focus and learn more. Moodle is an LMS recognized for engaging learning modules and is often compared with other leading LMS vendors and other educational platform players like Schoology vs. Google Classroom and Google Platform vs. Canvas. While there is still some debate about whether or not Google Classroom is an LMS, but the online educational platform Google has created does have benefits that make it a choice worthy of comparing with leading LMS.

• Gamification for Learning Enhancement

Because the learning material is more engaging, users will learn more and this is perhaps the true purpose of LMS. And using gamification in an LMS keeps your users interested and challenged.

• Convenience in Content Distribution

You can distribute the course content just as easily as sending an email. Just upload your users in the LMS and invite them by email. Or copy-paste the URL of the course and send an email through your mail client.  

• Cost-Effective Learning

This actually depends on which LMS you choose, and there are various types of LMS to choose from. Do you buy one of our expensive and clunky competitors, or do you choose our fairly priced easy-to-use LMS? It's cheaper than paper.

Simply put, a Learning Management System is a software that provides solutions and solves problems for convenient learning. It allows users to create, distribute, and store online learning course contents while also delivering lessons, assessing students, and enabling the evaluation of learners. It differs from the traditional, solely instructor-led training, as it offers a blended learning experience that focuses on catering to the unique needs of individual learners by providing diversified learning content. Commonly used LMS software also assess learners in ways that enhance learner engagement and progress.

Some common features of an LMS that you can benefit from are:

• Learning Experiences and Training Goals

An LMS focuses on providing learning and training that results in user progress in the real sense. While traditional academic learning is grade-oriented and focuses almost entirely on the delivery of theoretical knowledge that is consumed and retained only for some time, corporate training powered by an LMS is focused on learning regarding practical applications.

• Updated Learning Programs

LMSs ensure that the learners know the latest trends in their related fields, so they can learn from the developments in the real world. Any updates in course content can be made with ease so that students don’t have to work on training material that is no longer relevant or outdated.

• Convenient Course Content Distribution

Distribution of course content among your class is literally almost just the ‘push of a button away, with an LMS at your service. All you need to do is upload your users in the LMS and share the course contents by email, or copy-paste the course URL in an email. Such features of the LMS make it user-friendly and provide a very satisfying user experience especially to trainers who have busy schedules.

• Consistent Learning Process

Course delivery powered by an LMS provides a centralized source experience, ensuring all students have a single source of synchronized and up-to-date course content. 

• Easy Tracking of Learning Progress

While the focus is on learning, tracking learners’ progress is essential for identifying areas for improvement and an LMS makes it quite easy. With just frequent glances you can keep tabs on class participation and track the progress of individual learners.

• Engaging Learning Culture

Combining various forms of learning aids, stimulates and nurtures all the senses. Utilizing an intelligent mix of text, images, video content, and interactive features in a learning management system helps in building focus and enhancing learner engagement. 

• Gamification for Interest Development

Not every learner is able to stay focused for long and some need more stimuli and engaging content to stay interested. Gamification in an LMS challenges users and trains them in an entertaining manner.

Although, prior to the pandemic Learning Management Systems were primarily seen as school software applications for the creation, implementation, and delivery of academic and training courses for K–12 schools, now their usage has broadened and diversified.

Colleges, Universities, and Vocational training institutes also make use of Learning Management Systems due to their suite of advanced features and responsive user interfaces.

• Cost-Effectiveness and Time Saving Capability

Learning management systems enable flexibility in learning and are infamous for helping learners in saving time. The virtual classrooms powered by LMSs facilitate users in saving extra costs spent on transportation, renting lecture halls, and administrative costs such as paper printing, etc. can also be saved

• Customizable Content

Learning Management Systems take pride in serving fresh, updated, and relevant course content to their learners. This is due to the ease of updating existing content in an LMS course.

• Consistent and Scalable Training Module Content

As all the training materials are available from a consolidated and centralized source, it facilitates east and consistent content distribution. Anyone enrolled in a particular online training program, irrespective of their geographical location can access the same training materials as the other user population that has signed up for the same course.

• Open Source Code Platform

Open-source LMS platforms spare you from being entirely dependent on a single vendor for technical support, periodic maintenance, and service, as an open-source platform has its source code available for users to edit and improve.

• Flexible Access to Learning Material

The flexibility and ease that comes with an LMS is probably its most popular feature. Learners are no longer tied down by timelines, localities, and hard copies of learning materials. Online learning materials are easy to access and more engaging. These are available in a variety of formats as well, for instance as video content and podcasts, reducing learner dependency on a single mode of learning.

Learning Management Systems are elegant, cloud-based software solutions that enable flexible learning and host a list of features that are gaining increasing popularity. 

Other key benefits include:

• Unlimited and flexible access to learning materials.
• No trainer costs.
• Reduced learning costs. 
• Easily trackable learner progress.
• Organized, updated, and centralized learning content.
• Useful integrations with commonly used tools. 
• Virtual social learning experiences.
• Time-saving and cost-effective training.