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Your LMS is a critical element of your program’s success. But, you’re also budget savvy. You want to optimize the value of your organization’s investment in its educational programming by finding the right features at the best price. That’s admirable, but you can’t afford to trust your LMS to a cheap alternative to an enterprise-grade platform. In this post we’ll show you why bargain-hunting when it comes to an LMS is a bit like looking for the cheapest used car you can find for a cross-country road trip (i.e. a recipe for disaster), and we’ll provide a shortcut to getting the features you need at a price that will save you money in the long-term.
The quality of your LMS will determine the long-term success of your educational programming
While your team’s efforts at learner recruitment and ongoing marketing campaigns will go a long way towards building your program, the long-term success of your endeavor is inextricably connected to the quality of your LMS. That’s because several key elements of a successful educational program depend on the features offered by your LMS platform.
Learner Engagement
Once you’ve succeeded in getting new learners interested, registered, and consistently interacting with the LMS, you’ve got to keep them engaged. That means your courses should not only be rich in relevant content, they should also hold learners’ attention creatively through the duration of the course. That may mean your course will use videos, animation, or customized post-assessment feedback to keep learners on track. A cheap, generic LMS won’t allow you to easily swap multimedia components in and out of course activities, or let you target struggling learners with new content for extra enrichment.
Why Learner Engagement Matters: Engaged learners complete their courses. According to recent statistics, 40% of online learners who aren’t getting what they need from their courses drop out.
User Experience
Nothing is more irritating to an online learner than a poorly designed user interface or navigational structure. It isn’t just our opinion. Web development best practices studies and neuroscience research has shown that a learner who feels confused, overwhelmed, or just plain annoyed by the hurdles presented during online learning won’t get the full benefit of their educational experience. These roadblocks to learning could take many forms, but they often include:
Poor Navigational Structure
If it’s difficult for learners to find their way back to an activity or get from a post-assessment review to the next lesson, you’re certain to alienate a good number of learners over time. That’s because in the digital age consumers have become accustomed to effortless transitions between tasks. Adding layers of complexity to the learning experience is a sure-fire way to make learners think twice about using your platform.
Inaccessible Content
While videos and animation are great ways to help learners retain complex concepts, having them head to a third-party website to watch the video or download special software is not great. That’s because even though it may only take a few minutes, any interruption in the learning experience can compromise its impact for your members.
A Non-Intuitive Onboarding Process
It’s a mouthful, but the concept is quite simple. The quality of the process in introducing your learners to your platform will have a big influence on their willingness to begin the course, how well they learn, or if they just give up. As your new learners are introduced to your program, they shouldn’t be bogged down with unnecessary steps to launch an activity, nor should your introduction be a few lines in an email. An intuitive onboarding process means employing best practices and common sense in getting busy professionals to get excited about learning a new skill.
Why User Experience Matters: A bargain LMS won’t make it easy (or in some cases possible) to present learners with a user-friendly front end experience or a self-service onboarding process that is comprehensive and efficient.
Content Agility
Content agility may sound like a trendy phrase but it’s really just an old idea about how to get the most out of your content creation efforts. Your LMS will be delivering challenging concepts in bite-sized chunks to your learners and you want the assimilation process to be as easy as possible. That means you’ll want to be able to create impactful activities and have that same level of quality translated across multiple screens. With an enterprise-grade platform like EthosCE, it is simple to take videos, live streams, or webinars and integrate them with your LMS content. Users at live events can easily check in, view online content, and then get back to complimentary on-site events.
Why Content Agility Matters: It isn’t enough to post a link and hope they click on extra content that will enhance their lesson. Your learners expect the same powerful learning experiences from your brand wherever they are. A cheap LMS will let you perform basic tasks like offering a quiz or uploading documents, but it won’t have the ability to help you execute a tactical content strategy.
Our vision of content agility means more than multi-platform learning experiences. We empower you to connect your learners to a borderless, immersive education that accurately reflects your educational mission.
Your LMS should be more than just a platform
Without partnership-level support, even the most advanced LMS may not provide the best value. It’s likely that you already know this. With EthosCE, we’re with you from day one, providing all the support that you need to launch on schedule and grow your program seamlessly. Our features include:
- Automated attendance tracking of RSS/Grand Rounds via mobile phones
- Self-serve certificates
- Support for multiple credit types
- Unlimited certificate templates
- Commitment to change and follow-up assessment instruments
- PARS-compliant reports and integration with ACCME web services, including ABA, ABIM, ABP MOC 2 programs
- Automated reporting to boards and other external systems, including ACCME PARS, CE Broker, CPE Monitor, and more
- Complete CME tracking lifecycle management
A cheap LMS won’t provide a user-experience for learners that promotes knowledge retention and engagement
EthosCE’s platform is designed around the latest learning experience (LX) best practices research.
A cheap LMS won’t give you more than the most basic features, and that means you will be forced to ramp up your expenses as your program expands its offerings.
EthosCE offers EthosCE Analytics, a user-friendly data management, reporting and analytics suite that gives you complete control your program and user data
If you wouldn’t attempt to fill your car’s engine with something that “looks like” fuel but is suspiciously inexpensive, then you probably wouldn’t appreciate the quality of a bargain LMS. Your organization will need more than the bare minimum to reach its educational goals.
If you are considering an LMS for Healthcare CE and don’t want to break the bank, reach out to EthosCE today for a free 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our specialists today!
