Blog - September 3, 2021

How to choose a Learning Management System (LMS)

Choosing a learning management system is not as straightforward a task as it may first appear. As a system which your staff will interact with both individually and as a community, it needs to be chosen carefully. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that online engagement can be stifled very easily when users encounter technical hurdles. There is a dizzying array of choices on the market, and more appearing every year, as online learning and training assume increased importance in education, corporate and government environments. Every LMS has a different combination of functionalities, so you need to know what questions to ask to avoid spending big cash, and ending up without something that is core to your business model.   I’ve been researching and investigating content management systems and learning management systems for over 15 years. This article is designed to help you get your head around some of the choices you will need to make when selecting an LMS for your people. A Content Management System (CMS) is a web site that allows administrators to enter content and have this formatted and displayed to web users. YouTube, Facebook and the tax office all run CMSs. You also might have heard of WordPress which started out as a blog platform for articles but has evolved to a CMS as it has incorporated templates and plug-in functionalities which enable users to create e-commerce and intranet sites.  What’s an intranet? That is the system that glues you all together at work and lets people know what is going on. If you are lucky, you are imagining a well-maintained, visually stunning web site with a range of personal and professional content that updates frequently and helps to create a sense of community at work. If you’re unlucky, you’re imagining a static site that nobody goes to. A Learning Management System (LMS) is similar to a CMS, however it is focused on delivering courses. Some of your institutional requirements in one of these might include:

• User accounts
• Courses/content delivery
• Group collaboration
• Progress tracking
• Exams and Assessments
• Certificates/accreditation

Things get interesting where the two cross-over. A CMS can also become an LMS, for example WordPress is a CMS which now has a number of highly functional plugins which allow it to host thousands of students and issue certificates of completion.

One thing you need to make peace with from the outset is that an LMS which fits every one of your precise business requirements does not exist.

Some providers will undertake to build a bespoke solution which seems like it gets over this hurdle. It doesn’t. A CMS is not a Lego kit, and many of them are open source. If you choose a shopping cart of different functionalities designed by different contributors, they might not all work together in harmony. Be prepared for compromise to be part of the process, and undertake to consult widely within your organisation about ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’. Let’s look at some of your LMS options. In the higher education space, the big players are Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas. As systems which link to student enrolment and which must deliver content and results to vast numbers of students, these systems emphasise the ‘management’ part of LMS. Users and instructors are often frustrated by the interface and learning experience of a LMS solution, but it was never designed for them; it was designed to deliver administrational and security requirements. Even if you have administrative requirements, you should probably look past the ‘biggest – oldest – most popular’ LMSs, many of which are decades old, and don’t take advantage of contemporary approaches and technologies. This desire for a greater user experience focus has prompted the entry into the market of a new hybrid platform – the Learning eXperience Platform, or LXP. An LXP offers features that empower the students and which take advantage of new ways of working and learning, sometimes called the Netflix of eLearning because of the array of content and user choices. You may have heard of Degreed, Valamis, and CrossKnowledge who are leading players in this space. LXPs have a focus on work but can be broadly divided into three categories:

1. personalized content delivery platforms with AI-based recommendation engines
2. social learning and collaboration platforms,
3. hybrid platforms that combine content delivery capabilities with social features.

The LXP is a new category which has evolved over the last decade – they are expensive and are generally an ‘additional’ platform in large corporates which still have mandatory compliance courses organized in an internal LMS. As LXPs add new features many will become LMSs, albeit at the risk of neutralizing their key points of difference. The good news for users is that the conversation has moved on from administration to focussing on the student.

eLearning is not new. In Australia, children living on remote properties were able to complete their schooling through ‘school of the air’ via radio since the 1960s. This then merged into distance learning and CD-ROM or computer-based training (CBT) in the 1980s. Josh Bersin summarises eLearning technology advances as: From Content-centric to Continuous and Experience Centric.

Firstly ignore the ‘biggest – oldest – most popular’ LMS. Something designed 15 years will surely not work for you today as software evolves very quickly and was designed for needs and trends ‘back then’ – not now. Let’s have a quick scan of the LMS market place. Your unique needs will ultimately determine your solution but is good to know how big the field is on which you are playing.

You need to be aware that if you choose an LXP, it will be a focused solution and this could mean that it will not meet the needs of all stakeholders. When it comes to eLearning platforms, you just can’t have your cake and eat it too. For example, you might choose an LXP for its community building features, and then find out that it won’t do eCommerce. You love everything about it, but you need to be able to sell courses, but the designers of the platform were focused on other features and have not yet included an eCommerce feature. You want this, but it does that, and eventually you look at another system. This is what the process of choosing a platform entails, and trust me, if you do find one that is perfect, you won’t be able to afford it. Ok so now we have established that you don’t want to rush in, and that this will be a bit of a process, what comes next? Well, ask yourself what is the key driver of the project? Are you selling expertise online, creating a community, or pushing people through mandatory training? If it is the last one, is there a chance you should broaden your vision, and aim for more? Getting people together online represents an opportunity for more growth, more positive culture, and for emergent leadership. Once you decide what is most important to you, the choice will become clearer.

Story Time – Problem solving across multiple platforms.

I recently built a client’s online school with Kajabi. Kajabi is an excellent LMS. Strong eCommerce course sales (over 1 billion), strong email marketing and attractive templates are its key features. So I was surprised when I discovered that its eCommerce tool won’t do multi-product checkout like Amazon. What!? This client has many courses and configurations to offer – surely that is a standard feature. Nope – not in LMS solutions. The point being, that even if you know you want eCommerce as part of the package, you need to know what kind of eCommerce. My solution?  I connected Kajabi to a standalone eCommerce solution, in this case WooCommerce. To make the WooCommerce function work I needed a automation tool like Zapier to automate functions for me. So a student purchases a course on my WooCommerce page, Zapier then sends a success message to Kajabi and enrolls the student. Then I want to do a webinar with these students. I’ll now need to purchase Zoom. It goes on and on. Here is a table of a working ecosystem that gives you an idea of additional tools you might need. Perhaps consider a similar table in your LMS selection:

LMS in review…	Kajabi	Built in
EDM landing pages	Kajabi
eCommerce	Kajabi – but WooCommerce if multi-item purchase
CRM	Kajabi
eMail Marketing	Kajabi
SMS Marketing	Text Local
Support Tickets	Fresh Desk
Payment Gateway	Stripe – Paypal
Video Hosting	Kajabi
Video Hosting Marketing	Vimeo
Webinars	Zoom
Webinar Registration	Kajabi
Automations	Zapier
Internal team communication	Outlook and MS Teams
Analytics	Google Analytics Facebook Pixel Tube Buddy Similar Web
Social Media	Facebook LinkedIn
Content Marketing	Facebook
Project Management	MS Teams MS Project
Paid Ads	Facebook LinkedIn
Graphic/ Video Design	Adobe Creative Suite
Live Chat	Freshchat ManyChat
Visualising	Funnelytics
Virtual Workshopping	Miro

None of these criteria significantly consider LMS or LXP features but here is a short starting point…

Does the LMS have:
Intuitive user interface
Personalisation
Reporting and analytics
Social learning
Mobile design compliant
Assessment tools
Certificates
Security
SCORM compliant Learning modules
Collaboration tools
Commenting and Discussion
Quizzing
Attractive design
Easily updated without tech support
Content builder
Web accessible
3Rd party site integrations
Single Sign On
Price – per month or per user

 

Perhaps it an argument around Simple vs Complex.

In the story above I chose Kajabi because it has the best email marketing lead capture tool that I have seen in any LMS – with the caveat that I haven’t seen them all (as I am not 100 yet). New student acquisition is critical. When you are selling your expertise online, there is no school if there are no customers. The lead capture feature of Kajabi meant it was chosen over competitors with other strong features. You might have noticed email marketing is not even listed in the LMS essentials table… yet it was the key reason for selection as part of the product ecosystem. The internet has many review and comparison sites. These are a great starting point and they will help you identify significant players and product categories. Eventually you will end up at a vendors site reading the marketing spiel, which will inform you that you have found the unicorn. Just keep your head and remember they don’t know what your specific requirements are. Do you? Because if you haven’t done this part of the process yet, a glossy vendor web site is a dangerous place to be. One trend I see is vendor competitor reviews. On these pages vendors will compare their product and a competitor. Of course their product always wins, but you win too as long as you read enough of them. So do a search on ‘Product A vs Product B’. Looking at Kajabi I had no idea that it could not do multi-item checkout but a competitor review identified this for me.

Many LMS products are Software As Service (SAS) meaning you can subscribe and test out the product for free for a while, and pay by the month or year. Enterprise solutions still have big contracts and big dollars but emerging products are very competitive so consider paying for a few months whilst learning a new system and testing it with students before making a final decision. Amongst all the bells and whistles, try not to lose sight of the fact that a pretty white elephant is still a white elephant – if your users don’t like it, you have wasted your money. A word on price: table 1 listed a possible ecosystem of products, all which come with a fee so the dollars can certainly add up beyond the initial LMS cost. Even ‘Open Source’ (free to download) software like Moodle has a hidden cost. At an institution I supported there was a team of 5 people full time on maintaining and developing this platform. That’s around half a million a year for a ‘free’ LMS. SAS products come with all this work done by the vendor for a low monthly fee BUT you loose development control (there is always a ‘but’). Another product, LearnWorlds proclaims it is SCORM ready (PowerPoint style modules able to be uploaded to multiple platforms). I got excited because I had a client with 50 SCORM modules. Choice made. Only when I implemented one of the client’s modules did I realise that their product would not pass completion or grade results back to the LMS. So students could do the work, but no data or marks could be recorded. This functionality is currently under development . So you really need to test, test test. Don’t assume that a platform which ticks a box on paper, will actually function in the way you are imagining from your needs perspective.

The best idea is to review and test several LMS solutions all at once. Many vendors offer 14 day sign up trials and others can manually give you access if you send them a nice email. Sometimes I have been playing in a new LMS for a few minutes and I realise this is not for this client, sometime it takes many hours.

Note: This is not a Kajabi sponsored post, I used it for one client to match their unique needs. I have also implemented and maintain several other platforms, for clients with different requirements. Other research directions are YouTube reviews, online articles and webinar demonstrations. I strongly recommend joining product communities on Facebook. I joined one for Kajabi whilst I was learning the system and it was great. I received advice and inspiration that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Finally, I’d like to mention the X factor for me in software selection. The x factor is the ease of use of the admin interface. The job of creating content should be easy for anyone. Kajabi has a good admin interface but not the X factor of competitor product Mighty Networks. Creating content in Mighty Networks is quick, easy and non-technical. Consider always who will be around to maintain the system that you set up for a client, and their level of technical know-how. We’re here to help.