How To Choose an LMS for Your Organization
When choosing a new Learning Management System (LMS) for your online learning program, you have three options: build your own, buy an "off-the-shelf" solution or use a managed, open-source solution.
It is essential to choose the right solution, particularly at the onset of your eLearning journey as it will help you save time, money, and headaches further down the line. In this post, we’ll examine the pros and cons of each of the 3 routes and help you determine which will be most beneficial to your organization.
Learning Management System (LMS) e-learning solution agency
1) Building Your Own LMS
Developing your own LMS offers you a completely bespoke solution, tailored to your specific learning needs alongside other crucial benefits. However, there are a few drawbacks.
Pros And Cons Of Building Your Own LMS
Pros:
No compromise on essential features.
Fully customized (and branded!) learning experience.
Eliminates the need to pay for non-essential parts.
Cons:
A high financial commitment is required…
You may have to invest thousands of hours and training in its development.
No external support for fixing problems or adding new tech.
The Platform will grow old and will not receive new innovative features
Cost of Building Your Own LMS
How many learners do you have now and how many are you likely to have in the future?
Do you have the right servers and system infrastructure to support your new LMS?
What types of training do you want to offer and to which groups?
Finding the answers to these questions will help you determine the cost of building a bespoke software. And will require having an experienced project manager in-house, preferably with experience of managing large scale software development projects. Organization and experience are crucial because software projects have a habit of springing up unprecedented challenges.
A self-built LMS will suit your organization if you have plenty of spare cash to invest, aren't in a hurry to get your LMS online or have complex, unique training needs that aren't covered by other systems.
The solution is always the most expensive!
2) A Managed, Open-Source Solution
With an Open-source software, anyone can view or change the "source code" behind it. That means you can take a well-known LMS, like Totara or Moodle, and customize the way it looks and works to fit your exact business needs.
Advantages Of A Managed, Open-Source LMS
Offers all of the customization and branding you'd get from building your own LMS and helps to make it happen.
Provides unlimited training and support, something the build and buy options don’t cover.
The same easy access and fast time-to-market as a ready-made LMS at a lower cost.
In a nutshell, a managed, open-source LMS offers you the best of both worlds: the flexibility of a customizable system and the stability of a trusted partner to help you manage your new software, and all for significantly less money than a self-built or off-the-shelf solution. We hope this article has given you ample insight to choose the best route for managing your organization’s eLearning program.
Learning Management System (LMS) e-learning solution agency
3) Buying An Off-The-Shelf LMS
With a ready-made, off-the-shelf LMS you can get your eLearning program functional in a shorter time frame with only a fraction of the staff resources you would need if building your own.
Pros And Cons Of Off-The-Shelf LMS Software
Pros:
It’s cheaper than building your own LMS.
Faster integration—the system comes ready to go.
Access to continual security updates, improvements, and technical support.
Access to a dedicated team
Get the last innovation!
Cons:
Need to wait for new features
You'll have to adapt to any changes the developer implements.
Be aware of the price, always attractive at the start the price users can quickly stop your project.
Thelearning LAB LMS offers a licence for unlimited users!
Cost of buying An LMS
Perpetual license, pay-per-user, subscription, pay-per-course and quote-based pricing are some of the most common pricing models used by off-the-shelf LMS vendors. But there are several more. Given the wide range of prices and packages for this type of LMS solution, it is difficult to know whether you are getting value for your money. This is why it is crucial to speak to vendors who are transparent about their pricing, itemizing everything so you are clear on how much you are paying for each element of the LMS.
Make sur you have no cost per users, and that the solution offer the possibility to build the content directly into the LMS. Many solutions needs third party tools like articulate.