LMS, an abbreviation for Learning Management System is most popular among learners. The idea of this system is to manage learning online, preventing the barrier of upstanding educational organizations.
LMS helps students understand what’s expected of them, how they can achieve it and keep learning from multiple sources! So, let’s understand how exactly you can pick the right LMS:
1. Get your objectives straight by understanding your company’s needs and how the needs can differ based on the needs – Are you just looking at online teaching or training or something else too?
2. Pick performance- ‘Based Training’ features LMS because it’s critical to get outcomes from the LMS. Mostly, you’ve got to look for an LMS which helps employees or learners learn and keep up with the required development.
3. ‘Mobile Mandate’ is required because they’re used so frequently by most of the population! In fact, an American adult tends to spend 2 hours and 51 minutes on their mobile daily. Mobile optimization shall help you reach out to a wide array of audiences for engagement.
4. Do look for social media features so that you can simultaneously allow learners and marketers to share content, experiences and so much more!
5. Develop a training approach which will help learners make the most out of the resources available and flourish beautifully!
Once you’ve picked the right LMS, you need to figure out how you’d like to make the most out of the Learning Management System.
1. Make sure all learners are comfortable using LMS
This can be done via deep and extensive engagement with the content available. Once you’re well-read with the content available online, you can guide your learners, remember, you’re a facilitator and you need to know all the content before going for online teaching.
2. Plan LMS- assisted goals
A set plan needs to be decided on for good learning experiences here. Speak with the people involved like instructors, learners, administrators, and others. Find out to what extent you can take LMS technology. Most importantly, milestones must be crossed and appreciated post crossing!
3. Integration of video & smartphones
Learners today have access to everything. Studies have shown a drastic increase in online engagement of people on smartphones than any other device! Also, learners prefer learning via phones than any other device due to its easy availability and portability as well.
If you truly want to help your audiences, make your content available on free platforms like YouTube or make it available on your website, free of cost.
4. Content must be broken in meaningful chunks
The point of LMS is to help people learn at their own pace, not just study it for an examination and forget it! Which is why it’s recommended for you to break down the content in videos which are about 3 minutes long for maximum engagement.
5. Ensure ‘Lesson Planning’ & track learners’ progress
Lesson plans are still relevant in education for a reason, it helps teachers teach in accordance. Also, it helps the teacher to measure goals in the long run – this is the measure of success!
LMS has the ability to ensure administrators can give immediate feedback. You can look at your learners’ attention span and develop content accordingly as well.
Most importantly, you’ve got to ensure students are engaged, but how? Check out well-researched tips for you to engage your learners via LMS for great learning experiences:
Tip 1. Manage and monitor activities
Once you plan your teaching-learning strategy, nobody can stop you from executing it. Managing and monitoring activities involve reporting in order to improve course content, get feedback and so on.
Reports need to comprise of elements like:
- Student progress details
- Time spent on course content creation
- Learner satisfaction statistics
- Evaluation and learning outcomes
Tip 2. A vibrant learning environment is a must
You are in the digital world and even education need to comply with it. Good UI/UX designing can help you create a vibrant learning environment. This can be done by elements like easy navigation, use of breadcrumbs, easy loading of the website, exciting color scheme and so on.
Moodle users have experienced about a 60% increase in online engagement of learners via effective remodeling of its UI.
Break the monotony and they’ll never leave your website!
Tip 3. Keep all communication channels open
Students need responses from their teachers, sooner than later! Keep all communication channels like social media, email, chats, forums, etc. open for them.
With open communication, they’ll probe questions with amazing outcomes! You should always have dedicated channels open for feedback and communication.
Tip 4. Encourage engagement
Prioritize it too. Come up with assignments wherein, your learners need to stay engaged, like interact in forums or engage in peer feedback and so on. Gamification is another way. However, one of the best ways to encourage student engagement include:
- Creation of quick evaluation tools like quizzes.
- Progress bars to be included of learners. It’ll motivate them to get better each day.
- Appreciate high performing learners, give badges, awards and more.
Tip 5: Make sure your learners know the system in and out
In order to increase user engagement and to retain them, they need to know the LMS and get used to it! That needs to be done via training modules. You can also have chat options in-case of doubts, a FAQs section and much more!
Make sure you update the content timely. Also, should add new FAQs so that not many queries come to you.
Tip 6. Empower your learners
LMS is not just about learning, there’s so much to it! Help them develop themselves. In-fact LMS offers personality development, growth measuring styles and so much more. LMS is all about encouraging students to do what they want to and flourish, irrespective of going someplace to learn.
To Conclude
Obtaining maximum results out of LMS is an ongoing process which requires patience, time and so much effort! Keep updating your website every now and then and content must be fresh at all times.
Your aim as an educator must be to make the content engaging, useful and beneficial for all kinds of learners. Let me know what your thoughts are on this!
