Understanding LMS: User, Course Management, and Blended Learning (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What an LMS does. Essentially, we group the activities under three heads. User Management, Course Management, Records, and Reports. We will go through each one of them in a little more detail. So, as far as managing user accounts is concerned, the LMS manager, as you have seen, manages all user accounts, adding the user accounts, editing or updating their profiles, assigning user roles for different stakeholders, etc., updating the managers and training approvers, disabling or deleting user accounts. Now, if you look at these tasks in isolation, you may see that they are very simple tasks and they may not take a great amount of time. However, if you just see the quantum of these tasks performed, especially in the company, let us say with 20,000 to 30,000 users, then it becomes a very tedious and a very sensitive activity because any small error in any of these processes will cause a cascading damage on the whole training activity. Now next, coming to managing courses or the course management, there is in most LMSs a feature of customizing training plans or learning paths for their employees based on the existing curriculum, which is linked with job profiles and job descriptions. So, most LMSs can make these kind of paths or courses an employee has to take from existing features in them. It is a pretty useful feature that caters for allocating time for completion and tracking need for refresher training and other such concerns. This then is an important feature to enable customization of training for a particular job or person. A huge bulk of administration is managing classroom and online training sessions as training is most of the time a blend of both. Many of us in the e-learning domain do not know what an LMS does in classroom training. Let me tell you from our experience. LMS does a lot of stuff in classroom training because classroom training continues to be a large part of any company's training effort. 70% of the training budgets continue to be spent for classroom training. So, you have hundreds of classroom training going on across the world and what an LMS does is to schedule them, track attendance, register users, set prerequisites, capture the assessments or the final scores, and to evaluate the courses. And then you have online training, which is the e-learning starting from designing and hosting, customizing learning paths, making bookmarks in the courses, tracking learner progress, assessment, and evaluation. Also, many of us ignore that LMS also can function as a huge repository of assets in the form of PDFs or videos or hundreds of PPTs, which the company's managers contribute in their day-to-day work. All of them also contain a lot of knowledge in the form of online service and online books. These are the main tasks and there is a huge demand for blended learning. It complicates the task of administrators that much more, as he has to blend classroom and e-learning to bring out one offering.