CHAPTER 11

LMS Trends: Current and Future

The LMS became firmly established as a product category in the late 1990s. Since that time, there seems to be a doomsday prophesy every few years from people in the L&D field who believe that the end of the LMS is near. The most prevalent argument is that the LMS is limited, for the most part, to delivering courses. Today, we recognize that people learn not just from courses, but through social media, performance support, adaptive simulations, instructional games, short videos, and many other methods that do not adhere to the course registration and completion model that is rigidly enforced by the LMS.

So, is the end of the LMS at hand? The answer is clearly no. The LMS marketplace is still evolving, with new products emerging all the time. As you read this, there are hundreds of organizations considering, evaluating, purchasing, or implementing an LMS. Some of them are ready for their first LMS; others are on their fourth or fifth.

As long as organizations need to deliver courses, they will need an LMS. Training will always be a useful approach to meeting regulatory compliance requirements, orienting people to a new job, and helping people get to baseline competence. Many learning and development groups have a well-oiled machine for developing and delivering courses. So, courses and the LMS products that manage them are not going away any time soon.

Still, the LMS industry has, for the most part, sidestepped the problem of how to support learning and performance solutions that are not packaged as courses. Back in 2003, Stephen Segrave and Dale Holt pointed out in their article on how universities are adopting technology-based learning solutions, “The LMS may not, on its own, be sufficiently conducive to supporting the design, development and operations required within contemporary learning environments.” As the use of noncourse solutions grows, the LMS will gradually lose its position as learning and development’s core technology—the one-stop shop where people find everything available to help them learn and develop—and, instead, become simply one of many systems that support learning.

The LMS as One System Among Many

As the variety of solutions that support learning and performance grows, the LMS is gradually starting to move away from the center of an organization’s learning technology infrastructure and becoming one of many special purpose learning technologies. Many organizations are beginning to treat the LMS as a special purpose technology for delivering and tracking structured learning programs. But to support learning that happens outside courses, organizations are turning to other technologies. These include social networking and collaboration tools, performance support systems, searchable knowledge bases, expert networks, instructional games and simulations, augmented reality solutions, and adaptive learning platforms. Learning and development organizations are adding these systems, on their own or in collaboration with IT and HR, to enhance the learning technology infrastructure. Together, these systems provide a powerful tool set that enables you to go beyond course delivery to support performance in the workplace and establish online environments where people can learn on their own or from one another.

All the systems used by learning and development, and the content within them, can be connected in a variety of ways. You can work with your IT department to tie these systems together through the use of single sign-on, deep linking to content between systems, enterprise search across systems, and a learning record store to collect data from multiple systems.

Chapter 5 described the ADL’s total learning architecture initiative, more evidence that organizations are moving beyond the LMS and making use of a broader set of tools to provide advanced learning and performance solutions. Look for the transformation of the LMS from the main system for learning and development, to one system among many. The next chapter on learning and performance ecosystems goes deeper on this topic.

The LMS as a Transcript Warehouse

As learning professionals expand their learning and development solutions beyond courses, they will still need to record people’s learning. Using mechanisms like xAPI, you can track as much information as you like about how people are using the various pieces of a learning and performance solution, even those that occur outside the LMS.

One of my clients recently developed a blended learning program that involved assignments, research using a knowledge base, and participation in a community of practice. The program did not live on the LMS. Instead, it was delivered directly to employees through a portal, knowledge management system, and social network. They used xAPI to track people’s activities across all these platforms and recorded the data in a learning record store. They created a simple course shell—course title, course number, and course credit hours, but no content—in the LMS just to record completions. The course shell was hidden from the LMS catalog and people did not register through the LMS. The LRS and LMS were integrated so that when a specific number and combination of milestones was reached in the LRS, a completion was recorded automatically in the LMS and credit was added to the person’s transcript.

In this way, the organization used the LMS to record achievements, issue credit, and maintain transcripts for learning and performance solutions supported by learning technologies and content repositories that were separate from the LMS.

This example, and others, reinforces how learning programs are beginning to escape the boundaries of the LMS, even while organizations and learning professionals continue to use the LMS to issue credit and provide the official transcript.

Unwrapping the LMS

For years, experts have been saying the LMS will no longer be a monolithic system with its own web address where people go to fulfill their training needs. Instead, it will be “unwrapped” so that its internal parts can be made available to other websites and applications. Essentially, the LMS will change from a system into a plug-in capability. The learning management plug-in will provide a course repository and a library of learning management functions that can be built directly into workplace systems, portals, and websites. While not widespread yet, this change is happening in two ways.

First, organizations are using LMS application programming interfaces to pull out the course descriptions and post them on websites and portals. A mouse click triggers the LMS registration API. In a sense, these organizations are replacing the LMS user interface with their own website, where the content and functionality can be mixed seamlessly with other information.

Second, more LMS products are becoming available not just as stand-alone systems but as apps and plug-ins that run within web development frameworks like WordPress, Salesforce, and SharePoint. So organizations that use one of these products can add LMS functionality directly and seamlessly into their site, without the need to develop a custom integration. This is particularly useful if your organization sells courses, or if it provides courses that train people to use the products you sell. The courses can be linked into your web shopping site, where the courses can be linked to your products, or be products on their own.

In these ways, the LMS becomes ubiquitous as an integral part of your organization’s broader web presence.

Gamifying the LMS

Competition can be motivating. Points, badges, and leaderboards will become more prevalent in the LMS. I have worked with several retail organizations that have franchised stores and use a gamified LMS approach to feed healthy competition between stores. They use leaderboards to show which stores have earned the most points and badges related to the store employees’ achievement of learning goals. A gamified LMS can add a fun dimension to what may otherwise be perceived as dull and boring learning programs.

For several years, the larger course development vendors have offered gamified LMS platforms custom developed to deliver their own gamified e-learning programs. Now, the Open Badge Infrastructure specification makes it possible for commercial LMS manufacturers to build gamification into their systems in a standardized way that will work with most commercial authoring tools.

Advanced Ways to Connect People With Content

Many of the most useful website features to which we have become accustomed were first introduced on retail sites. For example, the shopping cart and checkout experience found in many LMS products are all based on retail website models. LMS companies will begin to incorporate other retail features that help connect people with relevant content.

What if an LMS could automatically recognize affinities between ourselves and other users and recommend content used by other people like us, perhaps saying, “People who completed this course also took…” or “People in your job role took…”?

Or it could provide personalized recommendations based on predictive analytics: “Based on other courses you’ve taken, you may be interested in.…”

These types of features could add value to LMS products by providing another way for people to find relevant content. As the LMS marketplace continues to evolve and become increasingly competitive, look for more LMS innovations that mimic tried-and-true practices on retail sites.

The LMS and Talent Management

Many LMS providers have expanded into a broader set of HR functions, commonly referred to as talent management. These talent management systems provide support for recruiting and hiring, performance management, succession planning, career development, workforce planning, and more. In many of these systems, competencies are the glue that binds people who have or need competencies, jobs that require competencies, and training that helps develop competencies.

In recruitment and hiring, jobs can be associated with the competencies required to do the job well. These competencies are then targeted in recruitment and candidate assessment.

In performance management, the professional development plans of incumbents are focused on addressing competency gaps through courses mapped to those competencies in the LMS.

In succession planning, high-potential leadership candidates can be identified and development plans can be crafted to grow their leadership competencies. Leadership development plans may include courses in the LMS.

In career development, employees can select a target job and compare their own self-assessed competencies with those required for the new job. These employees can then create personalized career development plans to develop needed skills to prepare for their desired positions. Their development plans may include courses in the LMS, relevant to their competency gaps.

In workforce planning, business objectives are established and workforce competencies needed to achieve the objectives are identified. The talent management system provides data on the readiness of the workforce and helps leaders make decisions on staff assignments, such as whether to rely on the current skill set of its employees, upskill existing people, hire new people, or outsource. If upskilling is needed, relevant courses are identified or added to the LMS.

Getting Better at What an LMS Does Well

LMS companies are continually enhancing their products in response to changes in technology, requests from customers, and innovations introduced by competitors. Here are some key areas to look for LMS improvements.

cmi5 Support

Look for LMS products to support cmi5, which does what SCORM did but much better (see chapter 5 for more information). It uses newer web technologies, does not generate SCORM pop-ups that cause problems with users’ pop-up blockers, and will work for people who want to access courses using mobile devices, unlike SCORM.

Mobile Users

Look for LMS products to provide better support for mobile users. Some LMS products still use pop-up menus, mouse-over prompts, and other features that do not translate well for mobile users. Some products continue to require a lot of vertical and horizontal scrolling on smaller screens. Look for these “laggers” to follow the lead of some of the more forward-looking LMS products. The progressive ones are well designed for access through a browser using any device, or they offer an app that provides a simplified user experience using accordion controls and other interface methods that work well on a touch device.

Streamlined Administrator Experience

One of the complaints I hear most frequently from LMS administrators is the fact that course and event data entry is too cumbersome. LMS products must balance the flexibility of feature-rich administrator tools with the simplicity of reducing repetitive tasks and streamlining administrator processes. Some products do not go far enough in making the product easy to understand. Look for LMS products to become easier for administrators to use.

Search

There are many powerful search technologies available, yet most LMS products fail to take advantage of them. Instead, they use native database search tools that lack features like spell checkers, “did you mean…” functionality, finding all forms of a word, and results ranked by relevance.

Think about how your favorite web search tool works. If you spell a word incorrectly, it often gives you the right results as if your spelling were correct. When you enter a word or acronym that is similar to what you want, but not quite right, the search tool will prompt you with, “Did you mean…?” and a list of one or more closely related terms. Searching on a word like writing returns results related to writing, writer, and writers. Most of the time, you are likely to find the result you want on the first page of the search results, often in the first three items listed.

That’s not how search works for LMS products. You will only see the results you are seeking if you search exactly on what you seek, spell it correctly, and use the exact form of the word; even then, you may have to search through pages of results to find what you want. Look for LMS products to replace blunt database search functionality with more feature-rich search capabilities that resemble the Internet search tools to which we’ve all become accustomed.

Reports

LMS reports are already becoming more graphical. More LMS products will offer customizable dashboards where administrators and learners can select libraries of data widgets to create personalized views of the information the LMS tracks. The widgets will display data in pie charts, bar charts, cluster charts, heat maps, and other graphical ways, making the data easier to visualize. Of course, you will still be able to click on a graphic and drill down to more detailed textual reports.

More Features at Lower Cost

The cost of LMS products is dropping thanks to newer, less expensive approaches to software development, the fact that the LMS feature set is clearly defined, and healthy competition in the marketplace. With the introduction of new products by smaller, hungrier companies, LMS customers have more options every year. Many LMS companies offer flexible and negotiable licensing terms. An increasing number of high-quality open source products are available with no licensing fees at all. Look for low-cost LMS products to become more feature-rich, and high-cost products to get cheaper.

Related Learning Systems

There are a few more types of systems that should be mentioned because they are closely related to the LMS: MOOC (massive open online course) delivery systems, online program management, and microlearning delivery systems.

MOOC Delivery Systems

Massive open online courses are not new; they were first introduced in 2006 and are now an established niche in the academic world. You can find these courses on the web, and most can be taken free of charge, although some providers offer additional fee-based personalized services and completion certificates.

There are several commercial and open source products used to deliver MOOCs. In 2012, Harvard and MIT partnered to develop a platform called Open EdX, which is available free for use by other academic institutions.

While MOOCs aren’t learning management systems, they offer some overlapping features for administering and accessing learning content and supporting learner and instructor interactions.

Online Program Management

Many colleges and universities continue to expand beyond the campus to reach students through online continuing education and degree programs. Yet, some institutions lack the resources to establish the technology infrastructure and operations to support online education. Several education software and publishing companies offer online program management services that essentially outsource the technology and operations for delivering online education.

Microlearning Delivery Systems

Microlearning is a growing trend in the business world. It happens through quick tutorials, explanations, demonstrations, and walk-throughs. It often takes the form of short instructional and informational videos.

There are a growing number of products that specialize in delivering microlearning. Some of these products also provide social features for blogs, user ratings, posting, and replying to comments on content and topics. These microlearning delivery systems have some features similar to an LMS but specialize in the microlearning format.

Key Takeaways

This chapter explored current and future LMS trends. The key takeaways are:

• Look for the LMS to move from the most important L&D technology to being one system among many.
• Look for the LMS to update learner transcripts and issue credits for learning that happens outside the LMS, functioning as a transcript warehouse.
• Look for the LMS to become increasingly “unwrapped” so that its content and functionality can be plugged into existing portals and websites.
• Look for more commercial LMS products to introduce gamification features such as points, badges, and leaderboards.
• Look for the LMS to get much better at what it already does pretty well, shifting from SCORM to cmi5, offering better mobile user interfaces, becoming more streamlined and easier for administrators to use, and offering enhanced search capabilities and personalized dashboards.
• While its feature set grows, the price of the LMS will drop as more open source and low-cost products continue to enter the market.
• There are two types of systems related to the LMS: MOOC delivery systems and microlearning delivery systems.

The next chapter explores the LMS’s role in the broader learning and performance ecosystem.