Comments on LMS Vendors

Helen asked me to talk to people about LMS providers. (Note: an LMS stands for a Learning Management System. BHU is our LMS. It is hosted by a company called Meridian.)

At the conference there are several LMS vendors who all want to sell you there stuff. I talked to about 4 vendors and it was very overwhelming. They all have some great features and, of course, seem better than BHU – at least on the surface.

After one session, I talked to an e-learning consultant and asked his opinion on the best LMS providers out there. He said that he really couldn’t answer that question w/o determining our needs, which would require an in-depth discussion.

Here are a number of features and factors we should consider based on my discussion with the consultant and my observations from other LMS demos:

• The consultant said that we would probably want a hosted solution (ie the system is hosted on the vedor’s servers, not ours).
• We should look for a short term contract or even a free trial so that we don’t lock ourselves into a system that doesn’t work for us
• He said that it should be customizable and that we should be able to customize and configure the system ourselves.
• He said that a lot of the system we need depends on our compliance issues. What kinds of computers and internet speeds does the LMS need to operate on/with?
• A lot of the LMS systems that I looked at generated a course schedule based on the user profile. For example it can create a bank of courses for a user depending on their job title or location. I don’t believe that we currently have this functionality, but it would be great.
• Many of the LMS systems had a calendar feature. So you could view all of the live training you were scheduled for as well as the course offerings.
• One of the vendors (a higher end vendor called Plateau) also had courses linked to performance evaluation. I think this is what we’re trying to do by hosting the GLP on BHU
• The manager’s view for Plateau had an individual supervisee and team view. It also had metrics via graphs and pie charts which were pretty compelling.
• The consultant said that we should ask LMS vendors how they demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) for their clients. This is a particular weakness of BHU. We don’t have good statistics about how, when and where people use the system.

As I learn more, I’ll add it to the comments of this post.