5 Things to Increase LMS Adoption
Few product lines can promise to be less than 50% effective, leave close to 70% of its customers frustrated, and still experience growth. But Learning Management Systems are such a product that has consistently left repeat buyers underwhelmed yet coming back for more. Read any research paper on the LMS user experience and you’ll easily find there are lots of buyers … very few of them happy.
Thankfully, we’re beginning to see an increased urgency from the LMS space to deliver more modernization and elegance in the learner experience and more empathy for the learning administrator. New players have entered the marketplace and these new players are standing up to the LMS dogma and bringing compelling new ideas that seem to be working.
Our team at Learner Mobile welcomes the competition as we believe that the customer benefits, the category grows, and all LMS boats rise if they choose to embrace the change. Based on our own sense of urgency and empathy for our users, we’ve learned some things over the past few years that have helped Learner Mobile achieve the highest user adoption and engagement rates in the industry. When we’ve applied these 5 actions, we’ve seen significant increases in learner adoption, activity, and engagement.
1. Make the mobile learning experience the priority.
Allowing workers to use Smartphones is canonical. Your workforce wants it, and they learn faster and retain learning using it.
2. Replace your long form learning with short form Microlearning.
Blame social media, but we’re becoming really good at consuming and retaining content in 3 minutes or less. Ten, 3-minute courses dripped to your learners over 2 days is more effective than one 30-minute course – especially for your field-based workforce.
3. Remove the paradox of choice.
Too much choice leads to frustration and an inability to decide. Yet many LMSs or LXPs serve up an endless bank of courses and burden the learner with endless scrolling through a learning inventory, hoping to make the right choice for them. The best LMSs are smart, know the learner on the other side of the screen, and put the right curriculum in front of the right person, at the perfect time so they can perform their best.
4. Consider using internal influencers to drive peer-to-peer learning
The content design and development burden shouldn’t always be on the instructional designer. And licensing 3rd party content can be expensive and unrelatable. Find your top performers and give them a voice to your learning audience to build camaraderie, trust and credibility, engagement, and drive performance.
5. Shift 80% of your learning from assigned to on-demand self paced
Put the learner in charge of their learning. Empower them to consume their learning in the flow of their work and lives. We’ve tested this. On-demand learners learn more, and they learn it faster when they drive when, how, and where they learn.
LMS solutions should be complex because learners are complex. But, they should also be effective. We’re hopeful to see so many disruptors and innovators join the learning space, but we’re excited to see that learning admins now have a real choice in how to make their learners happy.
