I had a great time this week presenting a session titled "How to Manage Large Scale Learning Initiatives Painlessly" for HR.com's Technology Enabled Learning virtual conference. Thank you HR.com for putting on a great event.
To get a sense of who was in attendance, I began the session with a few poll questions. One was: How would you rate the effort required to administer learning?
A: High
B: Moderate
C: Low
A full 64 per cent of attendees rated the effort as "High." Thirty-six per cent rated the effort as "Moderate." No one rated the effort as "Low."
I'm not at all surprised that all of the attendees who reported that they were managing learning manually using paper records and/or spreadsheets—33 per cent of poll respondents—rated the effort as high. What's fascinating, though, is that of the 67 per cent of attendees who reported that they were using a learning management system, a full 46 per cent rated their administrative effort as high.
Learning management systems are suppose to make the administration of learning easy and efficient. The fact that nearly half of attendees report that their LMS administration effort is high suggests that:
- Administrators may not be making full use of the LMS features available to them; or,
- The systems being used may not be a good fit for their type of learning initiatives
If you too rate the effort to administer learning within your LMS as high, consider speaking with your LMS vendor. They may be able to show you some tips and tricks that will greatly increase efficiency. If they aren't able to help, consider evaluating other systems that may better support your learning programs.
