27 Features Your LMS Should Have

As more people realize the importance of eLearning, it’s critical to understand how organizations may profit from a sound learning management system (LMS). Additionally, successful businesses must be able to expedite the delivery of staff training.

Is your existing LMS up to date and aligned with your business goals while meeting your current demands?

In this article, we’ll go through some of the most crucial LMS features to think about. But first, let’s define a learning management system (LMS):

Learning Management System (LMS)

A learning management system (LMS) is a kind of software tool that helps businesses organize and offer learning opportunities.

Purpose of a Learning Management System

By simplifying the following vital functions, the best learning management systems may help drive an organization’s training programs:

• A server that lets L&D professionals do these core functions:
  • Creating, managing, and delivering courses and other eLearning material
  • data repository for crucial information about a learner’s journey and performance
• This interface runs in a browser or app and is (hopefully) simple to use.

What Features Should an LMS Have?

The finest LMS systems help gain ROI and develop a more substantial business case inside your organization. This involves a thorough understanding of your company’s training objectives and how you may contribute to their achievement.

The following are the must-have features of an LMS for L&D professionals looking to solidify a better learning experience for their teams:

• Assessments
  It’s also crucial to monitor your trainees’ progress, assess their learning needs, and provide comments to assist them in developing. Assessment elements like quizzes and online exams help you figure out where your trainees are at and what additional help they would benefit from.

• Certifications
  Certificates are an excellent way to provide pupils with rapid feedback. Specialist certificate programs are designed to provide you with traditional workplace skills and job-role training. Some topics require a bit of additional attention, and you may need your employees to learn a large amount of content in order to be qualified and ready to work.

• Competency Rating
  Competencies are a means of describing the special talents that a person needs to possess in order to succeed in a given area. A competency-based Learning Management System can aid in the effective organization of a development system for employees.
  Keep track of your talents and bridge the gap between online and on-the-job training (OJT). It automates the process of certifying that a person has the necessary skills, knowledge, and competencies to complete tasks at various levels, ensuring that your records are always correct and up to date.

• E-Learning
  Online learning is becoming increasingly popular with the advancement of technology. Training content drives your learning programs, whether you’re aiming to train clients, partners, members, or internal personnel. In the realm of corporate training, several different forms of LMS material contribute to distinct learning experiences, but the LMS is what allows organizations to diversify the sorts of content they employ and how people engage with it.
• Feedback and Evaluation
  Receiving feedback can benefit the organization’s learning plan, just as delivering it can help learners improve. A dedicated location for your learners to offer feedback on their learning experience will help you see how much of an impact you’re having and whether you’re meeting their needs. Qualitative feedback is used to assess the quality and capability of your learning content to make necessary adjustments so that your corporate learning strategy can be boosted.
• Gap Analysis
  A gap analysis is a comparison of a company’s current and potential performance. You can uncover the gaps in your organization’s skill requirements and propose a way to fill them with a successful gap analysis. Learning professionals can change their training programs by immediately identifying patterns.
• Need Analysis
  Organizations can use people who need analysis to swiftly identify who is non-compliant and in need of training, allowing them to make better hiring decisions, retain talent, develop customized learning methods, and improve employee performance.
  This ensures that the relevant people are trained at the right time while also making sure that the learners grasp and are aware of regulatory requirements.
• Skill Management
  It can be challenging to determine what your trainees already know. Simultaneously, bringing new employees up to speed as quickly as feasible allows them to contribute value to the firm sooner.
  Skill management refers to “extra learning resources” that are used to improve aspiring leaders and mid-level managers. Case studies, simulations, coaching sessions, and joint projects are examples of activities that can be used to supplement your mixed learning strategy.
• Webinars
  Webinars are a great way to complement online learning. It brings people together, displays visual data, and encourages debate. Webinars that are integrated with a learning management system (LMS) promote collaboration and make sessions event-driven rather than course-driven.
  When remote training is required, webinars are necessary for people who are unable to travel every time new information is needed.
• Analytics
  Your LMS system should provide a comprehensive solution with built-in reporting and analytical capabilities that shows you the current state of your online learning courses. You can discover course popularity, current system utilization data, learner engagement, program effectiveness, and compliance, among other things.
  L&D professionals can use visual representations of learner data and customizable reports to assist them in developing better training programs by identifying specific pain spots to address.
• Gamification
  You get a variety of tools and services with an LMS gamification learning platform to lead your learners through their learning journey. With correctly positioned incentive points and badges, you can provide plenty of motivating possibilities for them. This has the added benefit of improving student attention span, knowledge retention, and competency while also encouraging active learning, healthy competition, and good user experiences, as well as lowering learning stress.
• Individual Development Plan
  An individual development plan (IDP) is a tool used to help employees advance in their careers and personal lives. Its main goal is to assist employees in achieving short and long-term career objectives as well as improving current job performance. Individual learners’ requirements and learning styles are met by customizing pedagogy, curriculum, and learning environments. By using Personalized LMS Learning, you may engage every student in your classroom and get them interested in studying.
• Languages
  With a Multi-Language LMS, you can ensure that your employees, regardless of where they are in the world, get the same features, advantages, and knowledge from your eLearning courses. It enables the system to be offered in multiple languages based on the preferences or location of the user. You may provide a customized experience to your learners by including multi-language capabilities in your LMS.
• LMS Reporting
  In a nutshell, LMS reports allow you to track what’s going on with your training, what it means, and what you can do to enhance outcomes. In other words, they inform you whether or not your efforts are yielding results. You can constantly update your online training strategy with its valuable inputs.
• Document Repository
  You can use the Document Repository feature to keep all of your training documents in one place. Trainees can also upload their training documents this way. The goal is to build a new part separate from the usual learning items area where users may effortlessly and rapidly download attachments.
• Learner Activities
  The Learner Activity Report shows you how your users interacted with the training content. Key indicators such as outstanding requirements and completion status can be used to track a learner’s progress. Administrators have the ability to personalize content for specific groups of trainees. This set of tools works in tandem with the LMS’s essential availability criteria to weave the best components of the web into your training portal, transforming it into a desirable tool for learners rather than just a learning management system.
• Security
  Sensitive information, user data, and other content in your eLearning course must be hidden from curious eyes. The majority of current Learning Management Systems have advanced security mechanisms in place to ensure that your data is kept safe and secure.
• Third-Party Integration
  Your LMS System should be able to turn on new extensions, features, and connectors that support your expanding learning program as new use cases emerge and your demands grow. The advantages of integrating your technology with best-of-breed applications are powerful in and of themselves, and they reduce manual labor.
• Social Media Module
  LMS with a Social Media Module is highly interactive and helps to create a social appearance related to one’s training.
  A Social Media Module shows the trainee’s profile with all his badges achieved, courses taken, and other details for other trainees to interact with them. Employees can share views on the achievements of their teammates which improves company culture.
• e-Commerce Module
  An LMS with an e-Commerce module makes it much simpler and easier to securely sell courses online. It helps admin sell training material and offers promotional pricing and discounts. With a number of payment gateways to choose from, selling courses across the continent is simple and hassle-free.
• Leave Record
  Leave record feature is a life savior for trainees. Suppose you have assigned training and the trainee goes on leave which is unavoidable, and by the time due period of the assigned training gets completed. The Leave Record feature helps in extending the due date of training without affecting certification. Administrators just need to specify that a particular trainee is on leave and the due period gets extended according to the dates specified by the admin.
• Marketplace Integration
  Market Place Integration is an essential feature in a highly interactive LMS that makes it a complete learning tool. This feature allows organizations to purchase courses from other websites and software and present them to their own employees and trainees. This feature makes any LMS a one-stop fit and brings a wild range of tools and content available for the trainees. Market Place Integration can be managed by the organization easily and they can choose to assign different courses to different employees according to their needs.
• Home Work Module
  The Home Work Module available in LMS makes it an LMS 2.0. This module is specifically designed to assign and submit homework and assessments in a more advanced way. It allows administrators to collect assignments from trainees, review them and provide feedback including grades. The assignment a trainee submits is visible only to the administrators and not to other trainees. The administrators can set details like deadlines which helps them to control the date of submissions in a more systematic manner.
• Branching List
  LMS with the Branching List feature helps within the organization functions and processing while maintaining full privacy of an organization formed inside the software. Generally, administrators of two different branches of the same organization could view each other’s work but with the advances made in the system. Now each branch can work smoothly without the interference of the other administrators while creating more sub-branches for smoother functioning.
• Two Factor Authentication
  Training content is highly confidential and contains important company information that should be kept secure. Another essential feature that your LMS should have is the two-factor authentication feature. It helps in ensuring security. This feature sends a generated message to the user before logging into the system and blocks users who fail to pass the Two Factor Authentication. Training content is highly confidential and contains important company information that is kept secure through this feature.
• Report Scheduling
  Are you tired of downloading weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly training reports? Then this Report Scheduling feature is for you. With the Report Scheduling feature, you can easily schedule different types of reports to get automatically downloaded into you LMS. This feature helps in saving a lot of time for administrators. Now it is easy for administrators to track trainees’ learning journeys and performance without worrying about downloading reports for a number of employees.

• Acknowledgement Contract
  Acknowledgment contract is a digital feature in an LMS to create a digital agreement between the organization and the trainee. This feature records the consent and confidentiality of the content in the training.

Conclusion

Whether you are new to Learning Management Systems or simply looking to upgrade an existing e-learning tool, it’s critical to choose one with the capabilities that will satisfy your company’s specific requirements.

Gyrus has many features that make for a great classroom learning experience. The GyrusAim LMS allows the user to schedule, monitor, and give training. Assignments, logistics, and other configurations can all be checked regularly.