Here are the advantages of leveraging an LMS for blended learning

For Administrators

1. Streamlined training process

• Streamline the training administration process
• Plan the training activities calendar and share it learners, trainers and co-administrators.
• Administer assessments and generate reports to determine the success of overall training.
• It centralizes your training function and reduces your time and cost expenditures.

2. Ability to deliver engaging and motivating training

• The learning and retention gets incrementally better with the addition of a new sense.
• A training program that offers a variety of approaches, including face-to-face, online, mobile to name a few, is bound to have a greater success rate.
• Choosing the right blend will help you break the monotony of a classroom session and the impersonal-ness of online learning.
• Increase communication and collaborative learning not just amongst your learners but also between learners and trainers.

3. Scalability and wider reach

With an LMS’ robust and scalable architecture, training is not limited to the seating capacity of your classroom. You can reach out to a large number of learners, irrespective of their location and department. Your classroom training programs with limited reach can be substituted, wherever possible, with eLearning courses and virtual learning sessions that can be delivered to wide audiences spread across different geographies, without affecting the consistency and quality of your training.

4. Easy and secure exchange of learning data

The LMS’ secure system and robust server, facilitates uploading, storing and sharing of learning resources in the form of courses, assessments, documents and manuals that complement your blended learning program. These online resources serve as a repository for your learners to access information just-in-time of need or as performance-support tools during a face-to-face learning session.

5. Technology leverage

Everyone is equipped with a desktop and/or laptop and/or a mobile phone at work. This entails a ready opportunity to leverage the existing technology at hand for learning.

By leveraging an LMS to deliver blended learning, one can not only make the training future-ready, but the use of everyday devices as a means of training delivery will make learning an easy and interesting process for learners.

For Learners

1. Flexible access to training resources

With LMS being used as the central platform for managing blended learning across your multi-department, geographically dispersed organization, training will no longer be dominated and hindered by time restrictions and will become a continuous process, available as and when needed by the learner. Apart from attending face-to-face training session or participating in a live group discussion, learners can continue acquiring and exchanging additional knowledge over the LMS through social learning and knowledge collaboration features like chat rooms, forums, online access to experts/ trainers, wikis, blog, etc.

2. Multiple learning channels and multiple media formats

While classroom is limited to words spoken and written by instructors, and is trapped in hard copies of the materials distributed for reference, blended learning via an LMS goes far and beyond. It offers learner-centric online as well as offline learning channels to cater to different learning needs and demands. Your learners can access a variety of learning elements in different media formats, like HTML courses, videos, podcasts, text files and lot more, stored on an LMS. This serves as a knowledge repository for a large amount of information which when accessed can provide an effective and engaging learning experience for your learners, which is not usually possible in simple, white board training approaches.

3. Reduced dependency

Missing face-to-face learning session for some (usually unavoidable) reason will not mean loss of crucial information for your learners while using an LMS for managing blended learning programs. They can access learning resources and even recording of the session (if provided) later via an LMS. Thus, learners are not completely dependent on one source of information, but can access it from the LMS whenever they need it. This also encourages self-paced learning amongst the learners and increases knowledge retention as it is acquired at their own level of comfort.

4. Increased interaction between learners and trainers/instructors

While face-to-face training brings in a personal touch to the training process, online training channels increase approachability. As I mentioned earlier, collaborative and social learning tools, and online help provided by trainers/experts/instructors facilitate interaction between learners and trainers. Learners can get their queries answered in real-time from their instructors and can even lend a helping hand to their peers in sociable way.

5. Twin benefits – traditional and innovative tools

The benefits of both learning methodologies – traditional and contemporary- are pronounced and transferred to the learners when delivering blended learning via an LMS. While the learners can benefit from the personal interaction brought in by classroom and virtual training, the collaborative environment provided by knowledge collaboration and social learning tools ensures that knowledge is no longer contained in silos defined by geography, function or domain, and can be shared and viewed transparently

More coherently organised courses

An LMS allows administration, curriculum developers, course content authors and teachers to create courses with activities, assessment, etc., that are coherently organised and easy to follow. Courses and course content can be quickly and easily updated and adjusted and as such are a more responsive and adaptive approach to developing effective elearning programmes. Teachers and learners can follow a clear, concise timeline of activities and projects, look ahead to see what’s coming up and review past work for critical reflection, all in one place.

More appropriate types of roles for users

Most social networking sites are designed for optimising corporate marketing opportunities and gathering users’ personal information and encouraging disclosures of personal and private details, while most Content Management Systems (CMS) are designed for e-commerce and/or web publishing contexts and user accounts tend to reflect this. eLearning, and learning and teaching in general, have different requirements that can’t normally be met by most CMS’ or social networking sites. An LMS gives finer, more specific control over what groups of users and individual users can and can’t do on the system from the administrative level right down to learners and guests.
For example we may want to enable some teachers and staff to edit activities and resources but not others, or we may want to enable some learners to be responsible as moderators and/or helpers for some discussion groups. Another frequently requested role is to allow parents to view their childrens’ grades and attendance. We may also want users’ roles to be different on different courses, for example making teachers learners on professional development courses.

Additionally, in a learning environment it is desirable to monitor learners’ actions and activities in order for teachers, mentors and sometimes even peers to be able to give guidance and feedback. In this respect, most CMS’ provide only the most basic user tracking since guidance, mentoring and feedback are not seen as a high priority.

Record keeping and management

A single centralised record keeping system is easier to manage, analyse and understand than a collection of commercial web services and sites with varying degrees of administrative, teacher and user access and data transparency. A well designed LMS will enable admins and teachers to look up individual users or groups to see their activities and analyse learning outcomes; Teachers can see their learners’ grades and learning outcomes, learners can see their own grades and learning outcomes, and curriculum developers and course content authors can see the interactions and learning outcomes both in individual case studies and in aggregated analyses. Want to know how effective your resources, activities and courses are? – Look up the data, learners’ activities, and the learning outcomes.

More coherent communication

Keeping channels of communication open is an essential part of running any organisation smoothly and responsively. An LMS allows admins and teachers to send messages or make announcements to groups of learners, teachers and individuals. Ongoing channels of communication are easier to find and respond to, and to review. Teachers can provide feedback in relation to particular assignments, activities and learning outcomes for individuals and groups. Teachers can communicate with each other, and learners can also be enabled to do this, in a variety of synchronous (e.g. chat, VoIP “internet telephony” and web conferencing) and asynchronous (e.g. private messaging, discussion forums and assignment feedback) modes. Planning, co-ordinating, and collaborating on activities suddenly becomes easier.

Assessment tools

One of the better known strengths of LMS’ is that they can reduce a lot of the administrative work involved in assessment. Some types of summative assessment can be completely automated with self marking quizzes, tests and exams so learners can get their results immediately and teachers only have to analyse the results. There’s less marking to do and no need to enter the results into a database; it’s already done for you. An added bonus is that it can greatly reduce the amount of photocopying your organisation does. LMS’ may also include sophisticated analytical tools to examine test results and assessments to look for areas where the quality of activities, learning resources, curricula, and learning and teaching approaches could be optimised or improved. Additionally, a well designed LMS enables teachers to provide consistent, frequent formative assessment in the form of written or recorded feedback, exchanges of messages, VoIP sessions and learning reviews. Learners can build learning portfolios of compositions, projects and learner generated multimedia for more sophisticated assessments that are more reflective of real world abilities and practices.

Integration with 3rd party software and web services

For smaller organisations that can’t usually justify the expense of running their own dedicated web conferencing systems, many 3rd party web conferencing service providers offer plugins for the more widely used LMS’ so that the LMS can be used to manage user accounts and conferencing sessions along with access to subsequent recordings of the conferences. That means that, for a fraction of the cost, you can provide online classes from within your LMS. All the necessary co-ordination between the conferencing service and the LMS courses, groups, and learners and teachers can be taken care of simply, quickly and easily.

Manage and track staff training with an LMS

Training administration can be time-consuming and difficult, particularly in medium to large organizations with many staff working in different roles across a variety of physical locations. The right learning management system (LMS) can streamline this administrative effort, making it easy to ensure each staff member receives the appropriate training as well as helping manage the classrooms, instructors, equipment and other resources needed to deliver the courses.

Facilitate e-learning with an online learning platform

Much has been written about the benefits of e-learning, and while an LMS is not essential to implementing online learning it can often make it easier to manage and deploy. Some LMS solutions include tools to help author e-learning courses, and almost all decent systems can easily import courses in various industry standard formats (e.g. SCORM) that have been created using separate authoring tools. An LMS often provides a single, branded portal for e-learning delivery.

Consolidate all training information into one system

There are significant benefits to having all your training information in a single, consolidated system. At a glance you can review and report on the status of company-wide training programs, identify staff who have completed certain qualifications, and much more. Rather than having to search through several disparate systems and paper files to find what you need, the right LMS puts all training information at your fingertips.

Reduce training costs with an LMS

While achieving the right training outcomes is critical for talent development and training programs, it goes without saying that cost is always top-of-mind too. The right LMS system can reduce your training costs in a variety of ways, including enabling the cost-savings of e-learning (e.g. less travel, accommodation more work time available, lower teaching costs, etc) as well as streamlining the administration of training programs across your organization.

Improve compliance with regulatory requirements

Another major reason for investing in an LMS is to better comply with the various regulatory requirements that apply to your industry and organization. For instance, safety programs are a common use for LMS solutions as it enables you to easily demonstrate that all appropriate staff are up-to-date on the required certification and training. If your organization operates within a highly regulated environment, chances are an LMS is worth considering for compliance reasons alone!

Administration

To manage and administer the learning function itself: classroom, enrollments, course catalog and instructors.

Facilitating Learning

To facilitate e-learning. LMSs can be used as a platform and a toolset to build and manage e-learning programs.

Enterprise-wide solution

No longer just a system for the learning department, now the LMS often used by organizations

Talent Management

A new talent management trend coming, where LMS systems are used to aid succession planning, performance management systems, performance appraisals, establishing goals and employee assessments as well as learning and development plans. Key technology trends and features support these top reasons to buy.

Anywhere Access

Last, because ours and many other systems are web-based ASPs, that permits you to check on your training wherever and whenever, previously impossible with homegrown systems.