Best practices for effective LMS administration

Well, effective LMS administration can be tricky because various concerns and challenges faced by LMS administrators may not align with issues being faced by the end users.

In order to fulfill the needs of learners interacting with learning management system, administrators should consider following best practices such as:

• Just walk-in learner’s shoes

LMS are operated from a reporting and data perspective, administrator’s view of making a system effective may be quite different from the learner’s view.

For many learners, LMS is unintuitive and it’s quite irritating to log in and locate required training. To understand the end user’s frustrations, LMS admin should regularly log in as a learner and see how the course experience feels from the learner’s side.

• Determine success measures beyond E-learning

Always be creative about how your e-learning organization measures and records learning, you should consider that e-learning is not the only measurable term which can be used with an LMS. A large number of administrators adopt SCORM-package only mentality and don’t consider adding other content objects.

Whether it’s about documents, job aids, videos, checklists to other types of learning and performance support materials, they can be added and tracked by nearly every major LMS.

You need to identify how to record these types of objects to encourage blended learning and performance support to ensure richer learning experience.

• Identify audience for targeted learning

Many LMS enables grouping of learners which allows administrators and managers to schedule learning events for relevant groups without any need to manage each person individually. Remember, not all the learners prefer to have large courseloads upon them at once may be because they have joined a new group or because several programs were added.

Always consider staggering implementation for groups and never try to overwhelm anyone and let learners to self-register for some programs, whenever possible so that they feel more in control of their own path. Don’t miss out on show-and-tell opportunities.

• Always promote content which appeals to more learners

It has been found that large organization spends so much time in participating in required learning like compliance learning. They may have little motivation to seek out or attend optional training.

Try to maintain ties with event planners or hosting a booth or an LMS demo with HR during goal planning periods.

As a whole, every LMS administrator should follow the above discussed practices and you get to find an effective LMS administration near you.