The Tired LMS

I was interested to note Elliot Masie’s recent newsletter discussing the “tired LMS”, and the issues this so obviously causes many organisations and their learners. In my view it also creates a major opportunity in the Learning Management System (LMS) market.

Our research here at Virtual College tells us that there are over 400 LMSs on the market at present for the buyer to choose from. To the buyer this must present real difficulties in knowing which LMS to select. While e-learning is a rapidly growing market, it is not a market that can support so many suppliers, and LMS vendors will appear and disappear with great regularity. This will also mean, as Elliot Masie (editor of Learning Trends) has clearly shown, that only a limited number of vendors will be able to actually invest in keeping their LMS up to date.

First of all, my advice to any organisation seeking an LMS is to carefully evaluate your learning requirements by building learner journeys and understand how an LMS can meet those requirements, rather than creating a list of technical features and benefits that you may require.

Here at Virtual College we have been on a continual path of investment in our LMS, to ensure that our clients and learners are offered a learning experience that is second to none. We evaluate both the emerging technologies and our learner feedback to ensure that our development path is up to date and relevant to our learners and their organisations.

As I noted in an earlier post, keeping an LMS relevant is not all about the technology, it is also about keeping the LMS aligned to developments in learning and skills. An example of this has been how we have aligned our LMS, called Enable, to support the apprenticeship programmes of several organisations in the UK, and we are seeing a marked increase in learners’ performance and satisfaction and real reductions in cost to organisations in managing apprentices.

We are rightly proud of Enable and our approach is to show you how it meets your learning requirements by showing you the learner journeys we support, so you know you are evaluating what is one of the most evolved LMSs on the market, from an organisation that is committed to the continuous evolution of online training, something we will never tire of doing.

By Rod Knox, Virtual College CEO