LMS Vendor (what you have) vs. LMS Partner (what you want)

When you signed your LMS agreement, it is likely that you believed that you were entering a partnership. Perhaps you assumed that your LMS vendor knew that you needed less, not more, administrative tasks on your plate and that your LMS platform would have all of the features that you needed from day one. As your program grew, however, perhaps you found that your administrative duties multiplied along with your users’ support ticket requests.

There’s a simple explanation for your predicament: you have an LMS vendor, not a CME management platform.

Getting Over That First LMS Mistake: Define What You Want

Many CME Directors are unaware that an LMS vendor—an LMS provider focused on add-on product sales—will be anything but a partner in their CME program’s success.

You know what you want: a tech partnership that will help you streamline CME management processes, enhancing the LMS user experience with simple, intuitive tools that come as a standard feature of your platform.

No one needs to tell you what you’re missing when you find yourself saddled with the wrong CME platform: you’re lacking an LMS partner, a helping hand that does more than sending you an email acknowledging your support request. LMS vendors are primarily focused on selling add-on features rather than empowering CME leadership with the right tools to enhance productivity. The typical LMS is a bare-bones platform, stripped of the essential functions required to create superior educational experiences for your learners consistently.

As you devote more and more time to developing DIY methods of replicating the advanced LMS features that you need, productivity levels across your organization could suffer. Your team may feel the strain of a workflow that must accommodate an LMS that fails to perform—perhaps even generating its own set of technical issues that will require new solutions.

Creating improved learner outcomes and intelligent program growth over time requires that your LMS become your workhorse (not the other way around). Here are three hallmarks of an LMS partner–a product that will scale efficiently as you work towards your CME goals.

1. Advanced Analytics

Advanced analytics capabilities represent more than just the data that you can glean manually—it means having the ability to trace and examine relationships between datasets. If your program experiences a drop in course completion rates, an advanced analytics suite such as EthosCE Analytics will allow you to pinpoint areas within your activities content that are causing problems for new learners by examining individual responses to questions on learner assessments. Here are the key data management features that you’ll want in your toolkit:

• Customized data segmentation for all of your program data
• Aggregate and individual course and user dataset monitoring
• Real-time and historical data displays side-by-side

Unlike software purchased from an LMS vendor, an enterprise-grade CME management platform will provide you with all of the tools that you need to explore your data and transform disparate information into actionable insights.

2. Data Sharing and Customized Reports

Efficient data sharing is at the heart of agile management and ultimately the creation of sustainable CME program success. When you are free from the burden of manually distributing reports and verifying that each member of your team has all the relevant information for their decision-making processes, then you get to focus on leadership. Your days can be spent developing creative solutions to challenges to your program’s long-term growth, rather than monitoring responses to email chains.

Here are some of the core features that will empower data-driven decision making throughout your organization:

• Advanced data visualizations* presenting complex datasets as easy-to-understand graphics
• Automated data report distribution based on role, item relevance, or content
• Customized reports that incorporate historical and real-time data into user-friendly summaries

3. Effortless Course and User Management

The most important component of user experience for your learners is their interaction with the LMS. From course completion rates to knowledge retention, your learners are wholly dependent on the efficiency and ease-of-use of your LMS. Your LMS provider should make each touch point between your learners and your platform as frictionless as possible, starting with their onboarding process.

Here are some of the critical components of an enterprise-grade course and user management system:

• Instant import of aggregate and individuate user data including transcripts with user analytics integrated
• Global user and course management including registration management and content updates from a single dashboard
• Automation of crucial administrative tasks such as email reminders and post-assessment feedback for learners.

What is a data visualization? It’s a fix for one of your biggest CME management headaches.

As your program expands, so will your reservoir of course data. One of your biggest challenges as a CME Director is creating agile, data-driven strategy to meet the changing needs of your learners while promoting steady program growth. That means that the insights your LMS program data can provide are invaluable for understanding which educational approach works best for your current students and which content will have enduring appeal as your CME audience changes. Data visualizations make it simple to summarize complex relationships between datasets and present them as findings that can be translated into strategy.

An advanced data visualization isn’t a retro pie chart; it’s a customized graphical report on the insights that matter most to your team. It lets you connect the dots between issue, investigation, and solution with a glance.

The EthosCE LMS comes bundled with the EthosCE Analytics Suite, an enterprise-grade toolbox of data management and analytics tools that includes all of the above features. Our LMS provides CME directors with a purpose-built, outcomes-focused CME management platform that was designed to scale effortlessly. That means once you switch to EthosCE, you won’t need another analytics platform, CME management platform, or a new LMS content management tool, regardless of how large your program becomes.

Do you have the right LMS partner? ensure that your team is always up to date?

• Does your LMS allow you to customize content and add multimedia components without having to purchase new features?
• Does your platform make it easy to troubleshoot aggregate and individual learners’ user
• Does your LMS offer automated data collection and warehousing?
• Can you schedule and automatically generate reports on changes to specific datasets to experience issues in real-time and instantly share data results with your entire team?
• Can you manage your CME program from a single admin dashboard?

It’s the right time to escape the sales funnel.

Unlike an LMS vendor, EthosCE empowers CME Directors with the tools that they need to succeed from day one, offering best-in-class analytics, data collection, and reporting features as a standard feature of the LMS.

For more than 16 years, EthosCE has helped CME Directors to build exceptional educational experiences, providing unlimited, comprehensive support from launch, and powering long-term, sustainable growth for thousands of organizations.

Tired of helping your LMS do its job? Connect with us for a demo and watch us work.