Hagen im Bremischen (Germany) | As banal as the question of necessary core functions of an LMS may be, it is difficult to determine which system will be used. In the following article, companies will receive a compact, concise guide to what should be considered and targeted when evaluating an LMS. This article is not intended to be completely exhaustive, but it should help to find a first rough answer to the question of which elements of an LMS are important.
– User-friendly and intuitive user interface
Both the learners and the trainers must deal with the user interface every day. Some to learn, others to feed in content. The user interface should therefore be given correspondingly high priority.
The interfaces to other software already in use in the company are also important. In the best case, programs from the areas of talent management, personnel deployment planning, accounting or similar can be integrated into the administrative area of the LMS, so that as many manual work steps as possible are eliminated.
– responsive design
This is particularly useful about the future viability of an LMS, so that the content can be adequately displayed regardless of the user’s specific device. The background to this consideration is sometimes the social development that smartphones or tablets, for example, are increasingly becoming an access device for many users, whereas desktop use is tending to decline. In some regions of the world, such as in many emerging markets, smartphones are sometimes the only privately used device for access. The learning process should be made as easy as possible for the learners in the sense of the often invoked lifelong learning, at any rate, and therefore, for example, also be made possible from home.
– Data protection
No more fear of the learner than that of a data theft that has taken place or of his learner data appearing in the wrong place should be greater in relation to an LMS. In order to build trust with the staff, but often also to meet legal requirements, data protection must be ensured as extensively as possible on a technical level. In the EU, for example, the basic data protection regulation must be implemented, which entails an orientation towards principles such as transparency, data portability and the right to be forgotten.
– Reporting functions
Every LMS used in a company should enable extensive forms of reporting so that the learning processes of the workforce can be analysed and optimised. These often also play a decisive role in showing the return on investment to the company management.
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