How do you choose a Learning Management Platform?

Why is this important?

Choosing a Learning Management Platform for your training process is the best thing you can do when planning your corporate learning approach. Ensuring that the platform aligns with your organizational culture, corporate learning goals, the structure of your teams, the technology infrastructure and the requirements of your organization in terms of the teams, these are all essential aspects to be checked in order to make sure that the implementation of it works efficiently. 

We have talked about this before, but the learning field is full of Learning Management Platforms, but not all of them work for your specific needs. So you should ask yourself a few questions before choosing a certain one. 

Questions to ask before choosing a Learning Management Platform

Does the eLearning platform facilitate engaging, interactive and social learning experiences?

Learning is not efficient if it is passive, if it does not motivate learners to engage and if it does not check the social learning aspects. There are certain tools that engage all of these aspects, such as gamification, interactive media formats and quizzes for engagement and interaction, and communities of practice for socially engaging learners in the training process. 

You can also ask the future learners what would facilitate the training process from their perspective, because they are the target audience and the platform should fit them and their needs. Do they need live streaming sessions? Do they need to access the platform on their mobiles? Do they want to engage in discussions and work groups?

Does it meet your requirements for security?

“If they (the learners) fear outages, slow response times, or the loss of critical data, they're less likely to trust and use the platform to store information, deliver key exams, or manage assignment submissions”, says one study on the field. (Canvas, 6 Key Considerations) So yes, security should be top of mind when choosing a Learning Management Platform for your corporations, especially with the strict legislations and GDPR in place for each business. 

Can it increase your institutions’ ability to use data and insight for better learning?

Will you be in full control of the training process after implementing an eLearning platform? Will you be able to have reports and insights on the learning paths and the evaluation process? Are the dashboards and reporting features easy  to use and do they offer the information your company needs? Is it easy to export these reports? Ask all of these questions when you are talking to prospect Learning Management Platforms to make sure that you can actually track learning progress. 

Other questions

We have some other suggestions of questions that we’ve come up with during our experience with clients from different industries, such as the following: 

• Does this Learning Management platform solution meet my requirements?
• Is the provider easy to do business with?
• What's the quality of their support?
• Is their solution easy to set up?
• Is it easy to use?
• Is admin easy?