Learning management systems are used to deliver educational courses or corporate training
and development courses.
So in this video we will learn what are some of the standard or basic features a learning
management system must have and what are the desirable features which we may compromise
a little bit.
So lets get into it.
Learning management systems are software applications which have the ability to deliver training
contents to students You can enroll students into your course then you can deliver your
contents, your videos, your audio lectures or your other assignments or your quizzes
and then you can also monitor the progress of the students whether the students have
taken a quiz, they have participated or they have watched a lecture and these type of activities.
So you can monitor all these activities in a learning management system so all this data
and all these contents stay in a cloud environment.
And you can put your own contents as well as you can curate contents, you can put some
high-quality resources there for example a high-quality YouTube video you can put there
you can put some links to a pdf available online on some other website, so you can curate
contents, not necessarily all contents should be yours the biggest advantage of a learning
management system is that you save on cost, face-to-face delivery is very expensive so
first let us have a look at what are some of the essential or must-have features in
a learning management system and then we will discuss the desirable features .The first
and the basic function of a learning management system is the ability for user management.
A learning management system should be able to enroll students in the course, to assign
roles to the students or trainers or teachers so this is first and the basic function the
2nd function is the major, the most important function for learning management system and
which is the content management and delivery and a variety of contents for example videos,
audios, pdf files, attachment you should also be able to put some quiz questions in a in
a database sometimes called a quiz bank.
Similarly you should also be able to add assignments and other learning activities, you should
be able to create courses and some learning management systems also allow you not only
create courses but also create learning paths which is very useful in certain situations.
So this is the most important function of the learning management system.
At number 3 is the course and resource catalog.
When you are developing a course, it is not essential that all of the contents should
be yours, you can curate contents, you can put contents from other useful and high-value
resources but one thing is very important here that these contents must be of very high
quality so you can put some YouTube videos You can put some pdf files and other resources
and links from other websites but there are few things which you should be looking for
when selecting an LMS, for example you put a YouTube video and you try to embed that
video into your course at the end of the video you don�t want YouTube to show the related
videos because those videos you don�t want to include in your course, so you should have
the ability to customize the embedding similarly some people even try to minimize the logo
of the YouTube So this type of customization ability and ability to make the catalog of
these resources must be available in your LMS.
Number 4 is reporting and progress tracking report and progress tracking is also very
important and there are a lot of things you can track because most of the modern lms they
are using the data mining functionality and you can track the time spent by students on
a certain module whether they have attempted a quiz one time or twice or three times.
So similarly you can also track whether they have attended a particular part of a course
and how much time they have spent on that particular part.
So all this type of data can be tracked and actually all these lms have so much data that
we don�t have time to use all of that but some of the important data we must be tracking
and we must be looking for the progress of the students through out the course and some
also have developed a learning paths based on certain requirements that the student must
have participated some of these activities before they can enroll in a next stage of
the course similarly you should also be able to grade immediately as soon as they submit
an assignment or a quiz their grades should be available to them so all these type of
activities progress reporting and all these activities must be available in the lms.
Number 5 is communication there are various forms of communication and what we are talking
about here is the two-way communication between a student and the teacher so teacher should
be able to transmit the information to the student during the lecture.
It is not only the audio and video which the teacher should be able to transmit but also
during the lecture, the screen recording , the screen capture should be able to be transmitted
to the students and some lms in the higher education they also have the ability for students
to ask questions during the lecture anonymously.
Because some students are shy of asking questions so this is a very good feature that they can
ask a question and teacher can reply to them so some people define e-learning as a remote
communications therefore communication is very important and there are some other forms
of communication as well for example some charts or some graphs software should be integrated
into lms so that teacher could show anything in a graphical manner or in a chart these
are some of the communication capabilities which you should be looking for in an lms
These must be available in the lms of your choice and now we will discuss some of the
desirable features which a learning management system should have.
So the desirable features which you should be looking for depend upon your target audience
and these should be the features which your audience must value so you should take into
consideration that you are not paying anything extra for a feature which is not valuable
for your target audience.
So keep this in mind when selecting any of these features The first desirable feature
which I listed in this video is the ability of the lms to customize.
Branding is also very important you should be able to customize the interface.
Branding creates an impression on your clients or on your employees so you might want to
change the font size or you might want to change the color or the style of the them
sometimes you might want to change the user interface depending on the website of your
company, so lms should be able to provide this support to you.
2nd desirable feature is the collaboration tools.
Collaboration tools are also very important.
These tools include the groups capability to make announcements or discussion boards.
On discussion boards participants can post messages and read at any time so these are
asynchronous type of communication tool.
These are some of the collaboration tools and other tools might include blogs and other
features might include the ability to make attachments like file attachment or video
attachment on these discussion boards so that people can collaborate with each other.
So this is one of the features you should look for, the number 3 I listed s ecommerce
support, so lms must have ecommerce support.
Ecommerce support is very important for you because at the end of the day you want to
get rewarded for your efforts the effort you have put to curate those courses and those
training products so the customer should be able to pay by any method they want to pay.
If they want to pay through PayPal they should be able to do that If they want to pay through
a credit card or a debit card or through bank transfer they should be able to do that.
And believe many lms have the good reputation but when it comes to ecommerce support they
don�t have this and you have to put some extra amount to have this functionality.
So be aware of this and there is also other marketing functions that should be available
to you for example you should be able to issue coupon the coupon codes or some concessions
or some other marketing material so you should be able to do that for example you should
be able to run some banners or make some announcements for the upcoming courses so all this type
of functionality should be available in the lms which you are going to select.
At number 4 is third party integration Third party integrations are very important because
we use many applications and we are so get use to those applications that sometimes we
forget that we use those applications so often for example every day we use Google docs,
Google docs, some people use some other Dropbox or some other app these type of applications
we use on daily basis so lms should be able to integrate with these applications at number
5 is intuitive interface.
When we say intuitive interface it not only means that it should be user-friendly but
also we should find the features where those features should be available because there
are two aspects of this one is from teacher�s perspective and the other is from student
perspective.
If students cannot find feature at a particular point so they might find it hard to use and
if you are a big organization and you have hundreds of employees for example and you
are going to select an lms for your organization so be mindful first of all you sit together
and you try to figure out what are user-friendly requirements and intuitive requirements for
your organization because if you wanted to change later on it would be a costly exercise.
At number 6 we have certification support another desirable feature for a learning management
system is the ability to issue certification because in some geographical locations candidate
prefer a certificate when they finish a course so an lms should be able to provide the certification
and also for some corporate organizations they want their candidates to re-certify after
a certain interval for example on an yearly basis so in this case the certification capability
is also a very desirable feature number 7 is support for blended delivery the support
for blended delivery is also very important because some students they don�t like all
100% online courses they want to participate at least some of face-to-face activities your
lms should be able to include those face-to-face workshops or a practical exam or computer
classes or hands-on practice on computers into your course.
Lms should be able to include those off-line activities into the course so this is another
very desirable feature and the last feature which I listed in this video is the gamification.
Gamification if done properly is very effective for user engagement students play games and
they learn specially the K-12 students and when they progress in games they get scores
they do competition and in this way they learn so this is also very useful and some of lms
are effectively using this in their system.
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thanks for watching, see you next time.