With the NextGen LMS conference in Austin, Texas quickly approaching, a lot of folks out there must be wondering what on earth a NextGen LMS is. Well, who better to shed a little light on the term than your good friends here at Growth Engineering?
What’s that you say? What makes us such experts? Well, how about this?!
Craig Weiss, the undisputed lord-of-all-he-surveys in eLearning, has once again fallen off of his chair in love with our Academy LMS and voted it the number one mack daddy best of the best Next Gen LMS in the known universe!
Let’s take a quick look at Craig’s criteria for defining a Next Gen LMS.
- Very Modern UI
- Simple yet Robust
- They Get “IT”
- Adaptable
- Value for Money
- Admin UX
- Support & Service
To tie all of these points in a bow, what defines a Next Gen LMS is the way it has been adapted with the users in mind. Let’s go over Craig’s points again and explore how each one puts the user at the centre of the action.
Very Modern UI
Today’s learners are a pretty discerning bunch and first impressions mean everything. If your interface looks like something produced on a ZX Spectrum, the best you can hope for is a hearty laugh…before the user disengages.
Simple yet Robust
With a Next Gen LMS, like with any human-computer interaction, the last thing you want to do is to force the user to think more than is necessary. As soon as the system becomes too complicated, people will immediately lose interest. At the same time, the system must be robust enough to cope with any future changes that the user might want to make.
They Get “IT”
We totally get “IT”…but we’re not going to tell you what “IT” is, because the only way to get “IT”…is to get “IT”. Seriously though, to make a Learning Management System work, you need to understand the people who will be using it and that’s all there is to ‘get’.
Adaptable
Nothing stays still for long, and the same thing is true for LMS users. As the world keeps a-spinnin’, learners’ needs will change and if an LMS is to be successful, it needs to be able to change too.
Value for Money
This point hardly warrants explaining – if your LMS isn’t providing the same level of quality that you’d expect, you’ll feel pretty sore about parting with your cash. Although the cost of the service might not have a direct impact on the learner, their learning journey might be cut off abruptly if their LMS is deemed too expensive.
Admin UX
It’s all very well having an LMS that’s jam-packed with eye candy at the front end, but if the administrators can’t easily navigate the back end, then the system’s value drops dramatically. To provide the best learning environment, you need to be able to easily create reports and to edit both the content and the users. Without this, you can’t know how effective the LMS is, or where improvements need to be made.
Support & Service
No matter how user-friendly a learning platform is, sometimes you need to ask a human. It’s not enough to create a great system, you need to maintain a solid support network. This doesn’t just benefit the user – every issue that comes up is an opportunity to make a change for the better and to let it evolve into a truly Next Gen LMS.
We’ve never been able to sit still when it comes to the evolution of our Academy LMS – indeed, that was one of the things Craig Weiss loved so much about us.
“This is one platform that crushes the criteria and what really amazes me, okay touches my heart – no crying please – is the constant updates to the system as in new features and capabilities. Unlike some platforms that bring out updates once a quarter, Growth Engineering pushes them out typically monthly or every other month.”
If you really want to touch learners’ hearts (and we do), you need to give them the kind of learning experience that they want. To know what they want, you have to listen to them.
If you’d like to have your heart touched in a warm and fuzzy, non-invasive way, sign up for our next Academy LMS demo by clicking that inviting-looking button below.
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