Advantages and Benefits of an LMS

The advantages and benefits of using an LMS depend on its context of use. In the case of educational institutions, it is a key part in offering and managing distance courses and also in its use as a digital support platform for students.
Now when we think about corporate education. The need for an LMS for the company to use for its employees, the advantages and benefits are not always different, but they are clear. below we highlight the main reasons and benefits that the implementation of an LMS platform can bring to an organization:

Training Costs
This is one of the first motivators that appear to influence the implementation of a learning management system. An LMS reduces or eliminates various costs related to on-site training.

If any part of the training does not need to be conducted in person, or even all of it, you directly eliminate costs with the use of the place and with the displacement of people to carry out the training.

Furthermore, once a course is implemented via the platform, it can be used recurrently to train more people.

Conformity
Many organizations have instructions that are essential for all or a certain group of employees to obtain in order to carry out their work properly. Certain organizations are even audited in relation to the training and guidance they need to pass on to their employees, and may receive penalties and fines if they do not comply with the regulation.

In this context, the LMS allows all the training that each employee profile must undergo to be indicated and tracked. With this, it is possible to systematize the control of who did and who did not do a certain training.

Several learning platforms have specific features to control compliance, such as expiration dates for courses taken, stating that the employee has to recertify. This functionality ensures that the organization is always in compliance, for example.

Engagement
Employees who receive corporate training frequently are generally more engaged than those who are not targeted by training actions. Engagement is reflected in productivity and increased organizational results.

Learning management systems in this sense allow employees to do more training and each one to follow at their own pace.

Agility in training
Today, with the existing features in the LMS, it is very fast to create a training. There is not always a need to build content.

You can simply use existing content available on the Internet and then create a content trail within a course in order to provide the user with the necessary knowledge and control their access to each of the materials. This makes it much faster to make the necessary content available to a large number of people in a systematic and monitored way.

Organization diagnosis
The LMS also assists in diagnosing an organization's employees. Various data is stored in the system, from access, successful or unsuccessful course completion, to time spent on certain content or assessment results.

This information, if organized and analyzed, can reveal knowledge gaps in a given area. Above average employees who could be promoted and more relevant materials. Finally, a series of information that help to have a better view of the strengths and challenges that an organization has.

Scalability
This is an obvious advantage with the use of learning management platforms. The possibility of enrolling thousands of users in a given course and providing access to knowledge to a large audience of users is in fact one of the greatest advantages of using an LMS.

LMS Hosting or Cloud Usage
LMSs are web systems that need to be installed on some computer with server features for their users to access. LMS providers basically offer 3 models in this regard:

LMS hosted by the customer
LMS hosted by the vendor on a dedicated server for the customer (private cloud or private cloud)
LMS hosted on Cloud or Cloud.
In the first model, the customer is responsible for having the infrastructure in terms of equipment needed to install the LMS. All infrastructure management, installation and updating of software components needed to run the LMS and backups is managed by the customer.

Companies that opt ​​for this model usually have a well-qualified IT team, a physical structure of servers and equipment that already run other systems.

In the second model, private cloud or private cloud , the customer contracts the LMS with a dedicated service. Installation of the LMS is performed on a server managed by the vendor and with specific features for the customer.

LMS updates and maintenance, backups, equipment changes and scalability are all performed specifically for the customer. This requires ongoing collaboration and communication between customer and supplier teams.

The third model corresponds to the trend most observed today. The LMS in the cloud or cloud is when you have the LMS available as a shared service. To make it clearer to you, it is when you have a single version of the LMS installed on the vendor's servers and this version is used by multiple clients at the same time.

However, there is a logical separation of data from one customer and the other in such a way that the customer's final perception is as if he were using a system exclusive to him. In this model, software and hardware updates, when they occur, are applied to all customers at the same time.

In this way, the provider can manage more customers at the same time, which reduces hosting and management costs and provides a better price for the end customer.

For the customer, cloud platforms generally, with some exceptions, are less flexible in terms of customization, as those in the private cloud and customer-hosted models offer more customization features since the LMS is not shared but dedicated to a single customer.

But in terms of stability and scalability, cloud LMSs are typically more robust in this regard as they only maintain a single version that many customers access.

The Future of LMS
Regarding the use for the educational environment in educational institutions what we noticed is the focus on improving the educational experience incorporating new technological resources to make the educational experience more impactful, efficient, engaging and why not, more fun.

In this sense, videos, content customization according to the user profile (adaptive learning or adaptive learning), real-time interaction resources via video and audio from anywhere, accessibility, gamification and integration with global content providers are the trends in this perspective.

When we look at the use of LMS in corporate environments we see it is a trend clear of the LMS systems evolve to another class, called TMS, Talent Management System , or System Talent Management .

The LMS becomes a module of a TMS that has other modules such as:

Recruitment
Performance Assessment (Goals and Skills)
Succession
Compensation
In this way, all processes related to the management and development of employees are unified.

The LMS actually permeates the other TMS processes. For example, in Recruitment, candidates can be evaluated using LMS resources.

When talking about Goals and Skills , courses can be directly related to the objective of improving performance on goals and skills. In Succession, in order to verify which positions within the organization a person can assume, one can take into account the training that he/she has carried out.

Another point that has also gained increasing importance and has no room to go back is the question of the analytical capacity of information in these systems. The LMS and TMS become one of the organization's systems with the greatest amount of information.

This information is very valuable and being able to make decisions based on it about knowledge management and employee development is of great importance for the organization.

Finally, the issue of new devices and their integration and application with LMSs, such as smart watches, devices that inform their location such as smartphones and tablets, virtual reality technologies. Several vendors are evolving their platforms to make use of these features to improve the engagement and educational experience.