Deciding on a learning management system (LMS) for your company’s professional training needs isn’t easy. The eLearning industry has an abundance of LMS vendors, making finding the right one for your organization extremely challenging.
When you’re in the market for learning management software, it is important to compare all options, services, and features available to ensure you’re making the right choice. Before you make your LMS decision, be sure to ask yourself these questions.
Who will be implementing the product? Do you use a third party?
A common practice of LMS companies today is to outsource the implementation portion of building and integrating the software. This can cause some disconnect between how you envisioned the software would function and what you thought it would look like after the initial discovery calls with your vendor.
Customers have told us of the frustrations of playing telephone between third parties and vendors when key functionality elements were misinterpreted or missing. Meridian Knowledge Solutions is one of the few enterprise LMS vendors who work directly with our clients to implement and service our own software.
The implementation team you work with initially will see the project through to completion. This relieves most clients, as they know we will be there with them each step of the way.
Can you implement it on the cloud or on-premise?
It is essential to understand where exactly your LMS data is stored. In today’s cloud environment, without asking, you may find out your data is stored in an insecure facility or a part of the world you may not be comfortable with. Under the on-premise hosting model, you run your enterprise LMS software on your servers, which are hosted on a data center at your premises and are managed by your IT staff. Also, asking them if their data centers are sustainable is helpful. If not, then ask them if they will be working with specialists such as Walt Coulston and others to ensure they become sustainable.
Running your LMS in your data center allows you to enforce in your training servers the same deployment rules, security restrictions, and DevOps processes already in place across your IT infrastructure.
Meridian offers secure SaaS (software as a service) and on-premise deployment options, allowing you to customize and configure the solution best suited to your organization’s unique needs and security requirements.
Can you personalize content and branding?
Most organizations have both in-house-developed and vendor-provided content, but which is most important to your organization? Is your custom training developed in-house or by outside vendors?
Organizations that develop significant in-house content will want an LMS with features to make content authoring easy and efficient. Supporting that content with the look and feel of your brand makes the platform user-friendly and better suited for your audience.
Personalized eLearning allows learners to set their own goals, go at their own pace, and communicate with managers and/or instructors, as well as learners, to personalize the learning process. Today, many companies are used to the benefits of site customization, especially for systems that will be used for several years.
With the Meridian LMS, learners can select topics of interest and receive relevant recommendations based on these interests on their homepage and in the catalog. The Meridian LMS allows you to personalize your learning management system with your own corporate identity.
You can embed your branding, create custom URLs and domains for different learner audiences, and deliver a fully branded mobile app experience to learners on the go.
Meridian LMS allows learners to track workforce readiness via pre and post-surveys with advanced branching capabilities, exams, and assessments. It can accurately measure learner competency and ensure that compliance requirements are met.Having personalized content and branding that resonates with your audience can help streamline completion rates and increase engagement in your learners.
Do you provide support or a community for your clients?
A sound customer support system is very important for any software, especially learning. It is important to understand the customer support features of various LMS vendors before selecting one.
The focus of a great LMS should be the learning experience it provides to your business. That is why it’s essential to clarify, from the outset, what technical support options are available to your business.
You should be sure you will have access to expert assistance if and/or when needed. Knowing the vendor will be there to hold your hand during and after the implementation phase is helpful. Meridian offers several enhanced support options to meet your organization’s needs, such as dedicated onsite Support Administrators and enhanced Support Managers, in addition to our standard Client Support model.
We also offer the Meridian Client Community site to provide our clients with an easy way to engage with others utilizing the platform and provide us with their input and suggestions. Client engagement through our user groups and product reviews gives us the valuable information needed to help us continually improve our solutions and better serve our customers.
Meridian’s support experts are committed to building a vibrant community of learners, a place where they can collaborate with other Meridian LMS users and share best practices.
Knowing the right questions to ask a potential LMS vendor is paramount. It can help you address important resource-related topics that will help you objectively evaluate your LMS vendor options. Many organizations invest more time and resources to examine eLearning content than to study the system that organizes that content. HR and training managers can avoid expensive pitfalls by asking the right questions before choosing an LMS.