After considerable time and effort in selecting the right LMS for your organization, no stone should be left unturned during implementation. You need to understand the features of the LMS and tally them with the needs of your institution. There are a variety of things to consider in the implementation process which makes it prone to errors. Some of the common missteps that you can avoid to flawlessly implement your LMS platform are examined below:
1. Gathering Too Much Information
Unless you are planning to drive course enrollments with user data, or generate useful reports for some other company-specific purposes, avoid storing it unnecessarily on your LMS. It’s unnecessary to have every data in your HR system replicated on the LMS, gathering this information causes you to end up with numerous fields such as date of birth, joining date, home address, and so on. Avoid gathering too much information to not clutter your interface, hardware, or records.
2. Not Setting Expectations
Loose timelines lead to missed milestones, which can cause your whole project to go off-track. Not setting expectations regarding timelines, milestones, and responsibilities. Even worse is not understanding where hidden fees might pop up in the implementation process. To avoid these types of setbacks, be sure to ask questions from your potential LMS vendors thoroughly.
3. Launching Immediately
Don’t rush to launch to your entire learning audience. Ensure everything is working as planned by coordinating a soft launch with some beta users and test use cases. This allows working on any technical glitch that might hinder ease of use.
4. Not Using the Integration Features of the LMS
Linking tools and platforms that you are already using are perks of LMS. But, many times it happens that you don’t take full advantage of its potential. Tool integrations help you to get in-depth reporting e.g incorporating with Twitter allows easy sharing of courses your learners completed and integrating with LinkedIn permits them to share their recent certifications and achievements on their profile. Missing out on this will be very unfair to you, as you lose a chance at free publicity.
5. Making Things Too Complex
A Learning Management System is implemented to make the company’s learning program more efficient and easier. Learner interest is lost when your LMS is setting up hurdles instead of removing them. implement in such a way that the LMS is easy to navigate, clearly optimized, and intuitively designed for user satisfaction. keep things as simple as possible to enhance the user experience.
6. Not Seeking Feedback
Our LMS improvement towards perfection is not a one-shot process, continuously gauging how it is performing by taking feedback from the learners is always a good idea. This way, shortcomings, and areas of improvement are known and user experience is constantly improved.
A few suggestions to tackling these challenges are:
- Asking questions and taking active help from experts.
- Don’t be pinned down by your lack of knowledge about the tool and technology, read wide.
- Assess your needs, understand how the technology can help.
- Identify the parts of the LMS that are relevant to you to ensure that you have a solution that best meets your requirement.