Getting the most from your learning platform is crucial. Why? One third of LMS customers are dissatisfied with their learning platform implementation. This can be down to poor product selection, products failing to live up to their promises, vendors offering poor support services or many other reasons. So how do you ensure that you select the right product and, once implemented, how can you maximise the chances of your implementation succeeding?
How to select the right product for your business (and your career!)
The stakes are high with product selection. Get it wrong and there could be significant financial loss from recovering the situation. But it’s also important to bear in mind the potential for loss of reputation to departments and individuals, and ultimately career damage. So it’s really important to get this right.
The learning platforms landscape is cluttered, fragmented and confusing. There are over 500 products in the LMS market alone, so it can be hard to even get started. LEO Learning has developed a methodical and vendor-agnostic approach to learning platforms.
This starts with a strong requirements definition phase which forms the basis on which the rest of the selection process is founded. The worst approach here is just to download a set of LMS requirements from the web or copy a vendor’s feature list.
It’s difficult to do well, but there are tried and tested methods for requirements definition that tie directly into your users’ and stakeholders’ challenges, so it pays to involve experts in this vital first step.
A process of market analysis, long list selection and functional investigations will get you to a shortlist. At this point you can do a deep dive into a manageable number of products and start to perform some useful analysis such as a radar chart for each product against your core selection criteria. We’ve done a lot of the selection projects using our tried and tested methodology for LMS, LCMS and authoring tool products.
Ultimately we are aiming to get the right product in place for the customer’s specific requirements. This approach has resulting in us recommending or implementing a variety of systems including Kallidus, NetDimensions, Moodle, Drupal, WordPress and SharePoint in different circumstances.
Getting the most from your learning platform implementation long-term
Of course, a successful product launch can bear no relation at all to an effective long-term implementation. So if you have a new learning platform, or even have a product in use that you’re just not getting the best out of, what can you do in this situation?
We recommend a six-monthly LEO Learning Health Check programme to help you ensure you get maximum return from your platform investment and to continually drive user engagement with the system. Managed and nurtured correctly, your platform can be the vehicle for moving learning to the heart of business strategy.
Our rapid platform Health Check sees LEO Learning experts sit alongside users in your organisation and assess the system from a variety of perspectives. The Health Check is led by a small, core team of experts, however the wider LEO Learning resource base means we can draw on a wealth of existing experience, market knowledge and intelligence to get under the skin of any identified problems to provide a more comprehensive analysis within a relative short period of time.
Our team will make recommendations for quick wins or other medium and longer term recommendations. Typical outcomes might be a refresh of the platform look and feel, internal re-launch of the platform, or recruitment of a platform administrator to drive engagement.
If you want to make the most of LEO Learning’s expertise on your learning platform journey, contact us today.