What are the features of an LMS?

Flexibility is one of the major perks that employees expect to receive from their organization. They expect most aspects of their workplace to be flexible, be it the hours, shifts, PTO policies, or performance management. Training is no exception. Since more and more organizations are investing in more regular training, it's important to provide a flexible learning experience to employees. A learning management system (LMS) can help with this. The responsive nature of an LMS allows companies to provide a flexible learning experience to employees, especially when it comes to allowing them to learn at their own pace. If you are planning on investing in an LMS, here are five features to look for:

• Options to support different learning types

Since one of the primary purposes of your LMS is to make learning simple and flexible, the option you select should support self-paced,blended, and instructor-led learning types. A robust video conferencing system ensures that you can organize online classes with course tutors as part of blended and instructor-learning types. To support self-paced learning, your LMS should come with a user-friendly document management system that allows your learners to access their learning materials wherever and whenever they need. It should help you create learning plans so that employees pursuing self-paced and blended learning can take a systematic and focused approach toward learning.

• Digital materials

Learning materials created as part of your training programs can make or break your training ROI. That's why the LMS that you select should come with a comprehensive resources space that allows course admins to manage different forms of learning materials including documents, videos, PDFs, PPTs, podcasts, audio files, images, illustrations, blogs, and URLs. Your learners should be able to access, download, and even print support documents at their convenience. Having all of these functionalities in your LMS is crucial to make your training programs engaging and flexible.

• Assessments and assignments

Assessments and assignments are really important to evaluate how effective your training programs are and how well your employees have understood the course material. That's why the LMS that you select should enable course administrators to conduct tests online and manage assignments from learners. When it comes to online tests, you should be able to conduct tests with different question formats, including fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, and true or false. Course admins should also be able to customize the duration of the test, its question count, and total scores. The LMS itself can also auto-calculate assessment results. When it comes to assignments, course admins should be able to state the requirements involved as part of the assignment to learners.

• Mobile learning

Mobile learning is one of the essential features in your LMS, as it provides a flexible experience for your employees and saves them a substantial amount of time. The mobile application that comes as part of your LMS should enable your employees to access their learning materials, attend virtual learning sessions, make training notes, take online tests, interact with their course instructors, exchange feedback, keep up with their learning plans, check their grades, and download their course certificates. It should make training simple and portable.

• Collaboration

Collaboration is one of the major motivators that can genuinely make training engaging for your employees. Select an LMS that comes with discussion forums that can be used by course administrators to initiate meaningful conversations among learners. Doing so will help your employees learn new perspectives and share their ideas seamlessly. Course admins can also make use of this space to exchange useful feedback with their learners.

Wrapping up

Before investing in your LMS, talk to your learning and development team and your employees to understand what they expect from their learning system. Looking for a system that meets their needs in addition to the above-mentioned features will help you make a valuable selection.

Zoho People's LMS has been designed to automate the entire training and development program. It comes with a variety of features that support self-paced and blended learning, digital materials, online tests, assignments, collaboration, and a lot more. Learn more about Zoho People's LMS.