Today, e-Learning is dependent on learning management systems (LMS). lms have been gaining popularity over the last couple of years and going forward there is a vibrant market for e-Learning services that offer reliable talent management, solid training, and efficient organisational development.
However, in comparison to the future of LMSs, developers and designers of the available LMSs must rethink their strategy, features, and position to keep up with a quickly evolving world. New players are already shaping the trends in the e-Learning industry with disruptive LMSs, and consumer demographics are changing with the times.
With that said, LMSs will face both challenges and opportunities that will catapult them into a new brave future.
Future Opportunities for Learning Management Systems
To envision a realistic future for the LMSs, we must first look at the challenges facing the LMSs in the current e-Learning industry, to identify the opportunities for growth in the corporate LMSs. They include:
Learning Management Systems Must Remain Competitive
The biggest challenge faced by traditional LMSs is that they tend to be conflicted between having centralised and complicated platforms, with the shift towards more lean solutions such as mLearning and microlearning.
These are modes preferred by a majority of the new age learners. More so, many of the traditional platforms do not meet the user-friendliness and the flexibility desired by the modern corporate learners. For this reason, the traditional corporate LMSs need to redesign their platforms and service offerings in order to remain competitive today and in the future.
Alternative Platforms Will Be More Efficient
Another of the challenges faced by current LMSs is that there is cheap, replicable, and easily accessible information online. Essentially, current LMSs are registered and formal learning programs and they are accessible to people who are not willing to pay for all the services offered on the platform.
This creates an availability issue, and it locks out a vast percentage of would-be users of the platforms. With new developments and technological advancements, LMSs of the future will be quick and malleable with a cost-efficient design, which will make it easier to access information online.
Moreover, they will be easy to access the platforms via mobile devices, and this will give a better learning experience to the users. Instructors will also be able to target the course work in the corporate LMSs to individual learners and to customise the content for individual companies. This will make learning and organisational development more efficient.
The current corporate LMSs are also experiencing a deviation from the academic and formal training of the past to focus on real life problems in the workplace. For this reason, training on the corporate LMSs of the future will be keen on sustaining or improving the operations of the business.
A Shift from Institutional Learning to Individualised Instruction
This is one of the trends shaping the entire education industry leave alone corporate LMSs. Some LMSs are pushing learners to buy seats or slots for classes, which is an outdated practice. Nowadays, organisations and individual learners prefer downloading the training materials they need for their personal and professional growth when and wherever
they need it.
Unfortunately, the corporate LMSs of today are unable to keep up with the changing needs and demographics of the modern learner. E-Learning trends show that corporates in the future will prefer to have unique training for their staff at the lowest cost possible.
Individualised instruction is only possible with by integrating the proper technologies. Big data must come into play to ensure 100% personalisation of the corporate LMS software. This means that corporates must invest in generating big data as well as and technologies to analyse the data and only then can corporate LMSs be future ready.
More so, the integration of smarter technologies will enable training instructors to create a personalised learning path for every learner. It will also look into the knowledge and material available to the learner, as well as personal interests, learning styles, and the expected professional learning goals.
Use of Smarter Technologies
Given the fast-paced changing nature of technology today, corporates are having a difficult time integrating them into their systems. The corporate LMS of the future will only surpass the success of its predecessors if it is adaptive enough to integrate with new and smarter technologies.
Unfortunately, only a few corporate LMSs are integrating technologies such as AI, augmented reality, and virtual reality. These technologies can collect data for every time a learner interacts with the system and in turn, be able to give a more personalised learning experience.
This adaptive and personalised nature of the corporate LMSs of tomorrow is the ultimate future of the LMSs. In the L&D Global survey for 2017, there were employee management professionals around the globe stating that the most significant trend in e-Learning and corporate LMS lies in content personalisation and adaptive learning.
Conclusion
By focusing on the current challenges, current designers, and development of corporate LMS will identify problems and weaknesses that threaten their existence. The future of corporate LMS is in making them flexible, more accessible, and with friendly user experience.