Steven

In Part I, Part II and Part III of this article, we created lists of your requirements and your nice-to-have LMS features. Now we’ll see if you’re using your current LMS to its full potential (and price tag), examine the growth and future of your current LMS, and think about the ramifications of switching LMSs and the true cost of moving to greener pastures.

Step Three: What features aren’t you using in your current LMS?

This may sound a bit strange, but there are a couple of very good reasons to complete this exercise.

First, by exploring the LMS features you never use, you may discover some really nice things about it that you never knew you needed. These discoveries alone could make reading these articles worth it.

The second possibility may feel a little less rewarding: you might be paying for powerful and expensive features you don’t actually need. It’s worth noting that if you can act on this knowledge, it might lead to saving a considerable amount of money down the road. We’ll consider this in a little bit.

If your LMS has had some updates since you were first introduced to it, chances are there will have been some release notes to go along with those updates. Often these will list bugs that have been fixed and improvements that have been made. But occasionally they’ll also list major new features which have been added. These features may not have had a lot of fanfare and you might discover that something really neat has been lurking in your LMS for some time, just waiting to be found.

Give your LMS’s documentation a chance. If it’s up to date, you should be able to discover all of the LMS’s features in the documentation. It’s much harder for features to hide in documentation than in a complicated user interface (this is not a challenge to LMS documentation writers to prove me wrong).

The option of last resort (but sometimes the most fun) is to simply try to see everything there is to see in your LMS. Permutations of settings and permissions make it possible (if not downright likely) that you’ll never see everything without carefully backtracking and documenting your every step, but just think of it as a point-and-click adventure game with an exceptionally poor plot and you’ll do fine.

With any luck, you’ve already found some features that you’re planning to use next time you need to perform some task. Write those down before you forget!

Even more likely, you’ll have encountered a few things that you have no need for now or in the foreseeable future. There are some questions that we need to ask about these features that are probably hard to answer:

1. Did someone in your organisation at some time foresee needing one of these features, and is their prognostication still relevant?
2. Is this feature a major part of the LMS and, despite not being directly used, does its very presence affect the way the LMS works in some negative way?
3. Is this feature a significant factor in the price of your LMS?

The last question is probably the most difficult answer because chances are, only your LMS vendor really knows the answer (or they might not). You would need to do a lot of feature and price comparisons with a lot of LMSs before you could weed out the apples-and-oranges comparisons and get to the real heart of the matter.

However, it’s pretty safe to say that you are paying for these unused features in one way or another. Somebody built them and (unless you’re using free, open-source software) somebody paid them to do so. I hardly need to point out the conclusion that, ultimately, you’re helping to foot a little slice of that bill.

By no means should this be the determining factor when looking at an LMS, but it’s a good reason to think twice before using a raw number of features as a selling point when considering any two software products side by side.

If you’re paying more for a product simply because it contains more features—features you’ll never use—you might be wasting money.

Step Four: Determine if your LMS is evolving the way it should

Is your current LMS getting a bit long in the tooth? Does it look pretty awesome…for a personal homepage circa 1996? Does it seem to get worse while everything else you use on the Web gets better and faster?

An LMS doesn’t have to look pretty, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t also take advantage of some of the enormous advances in Web technology we’ve seen in the last decade. There have been major changes in what is considered a standard user interface for a web application. Most LMSs will always be slow to follow these trends (‘old fashioned’ might be a nice way of putting it), and that’s completely fine. But it doesn’t do your organisation any good to let your LMS become grossly stagnant.

Your organisation’s IT department may ultimately determine what you can run and which browsers you can use, and that may limit which LMSs you can use. But this is something which should be revisited year after year. There is no need to lie dormant for large swaths of time while technology continues to improve at geometric rates.

Old software doesn’t sit around on hard drives just getting better with age. How has your LMS vendor fared with updates over the last five years or so? Have you noticed improvements steadily rolling in? Do problems get resolved in a speedy fashion? Do you feel like the LMS you’re using now will be better in a year? In five years?

Sometimes sticking with an evolving LMS can be just as good as switching to a newer, better LMS. The key is to choose vendors which have shown a commitment to improvement, to keep up with technological advances, and to addressing customer concerns with LMS updates as quickly as can be reasonably expected.

Step Five: Now look around; should you switch to another LMS?

The LMS market can be really intimidating. It is a market with some really big players. There are a ton of buzzwords. There are reams of jargon. You’ll never be able to look at all of them. The websites burn the eyes! They burn!

My recommendation is to search using the key requirements you gathered from Step One. See what comes up with just those. Now throw in your favorite dream features from Step Two. With the results of your searching, you should be able to come up with a tentative early list of LMS contenders. Start mulling these around.

Have you found any LMSs which are better than what you currently have? It’s okay if you haven’t. In fact, that’s great. You may already be using your optimal LMS. Congratulations!

If you’ve found a couple of LMSs that look really nice, or if you just hate your current LMS so much that you figure, “eh, any port in a storm,” then it’s time to weigh the pros and cons of switching.

First, we need to think about the cost of data migration. The information doesn’t just fly out of one LMS and into another using magic wizard powers. It just doesn’t. If you’re serious about switching, you’re going to have to find out how data gets out of your current LMS. Since your organisation already owns (or leases) the LMS, you should be able to get this information.

Next, you need to find out how that information in that format (you’ll need to be very specific with the technical specifications) can be imported into the new LMS. Since the new LMS’s vendor will want you to go with their product, they should be delighted to answer this question.

It may turn out to be easy and cheap, but don’t be surprised to find that the data migration is a costly custom task. I’m not aware of any standard interchange format for LMS record data and doubt one exists (though I would be very, very happy to learn that I’m wrong). So that means every data migration involves taking one custom format and converting it into another one (likely involving two very different database schemas). You’ll have to weigh this cost against a huge variety of factors. Despite the upfront cost, you could still save money in a very short amount of time if you switch to a considerably less expensive LMS.

Another thing to ponder is the idea of simply archiving the old LMS’s records and proceeding with the new LMS as a clean slate. Some organisations simply don’t need old data in the new LMS, while others do. The idea may have some additional appeal if you’re looking to reorganise some things while you’re at it and ‘really get it right this time.’

Other challenges that come with switching include downtime while you’re between systems, retraining administrators and reeducating learners how to use the new LMS and dealing with the other various little things which will come up when you’re swapping any large and important piece of software across an organisation.

You may simply conclude that it would be nice to make an upgrade, but your LMS is good enough as it is. Maybe there are only a few things you wish you could have. Don’t stay silent about it!

See if your LMS has an active customer forum or help center where you can post your wish list. Or give your LMS vendor a call and tell them about your needs. Let them know what you’re thinking.  Especially at a smaller LMS vendor, your request could mean the difference between an idea being shelved and being put into production.

If you need help establishing if your LMS is working for you then visit my website and let’s have an informal chat or InMail me.

Article originally posted by Capterra.