Customising your Learning Management System gets the most out of your eLearning platform and boosts learner engagement. Ideally, when choosing your LMS, you want to plump for flexible software that can bring your training objectives to life. Branding that delivers a coherent set of values and a vision is marketing 101, and it’s the same for the world of online learning; a customised LMS for your company will help you attract and retain learners.
Not all Learning Management Systems are created equal when it comes to customisation options, though, so here’s our definitive list to give you an idea of what’s possible in terms of product features currently on the market.
Add A Custom Logo
Let’s kick off with an essential custom element; your Learning Management System should give you the option to add your company logo to your eLearning interface. Since it represents your business, your ‘look and feel’ and is a recognisable emblem for customers and employees, it needs to be present in your online training too!
Plus, don’t forget to upload your logo to appear in the favicon as well. That little thing might be tiny, but it presents an extra opportunity for professional polish and branding that users will experience throughout an interaction with online learning software.
Flexible Colour Palettes To Represent You
There have been many studies done over the years exploring how we humans perceive colour and associate it with feelings and concepts. In the world of marketing, it’s now industry-standard to consider how the colours you run with can positively or negatively affect your business. You’ve likely spent time and money deciding on your company colours and ensuring that they represent you.
Colour is essential when it comes to online learning attractiveness and continued engagement with a learning journey too. Make sure your LMS offers the option to add your company colour palette to your eLearning offerings to underscore common goals.
Offer Custom Login Screens
You’re going to want your LMS to give you the option of custom login screens. This means you have the flexibility to speak differently to different users and provide additional options or types of access to everyone as an individual. The benefits of this in a Learning Management System are a customised user experience each time they access the LMS – and this covers administrators and students alike.
Custom login screen options should also allow you to reflect company colours, your chosen fonts and keep that universal branding on point.
Your LMS, Your Voice
Building a ‘voice’ is one of the most important steps in creating a harmonious corporate culture alongside logos and company colours. It helps your customers differentiate you from your competitors and encourages your staff to work together as a team.
Your LMS users will likely expect their online training to reflect the language style used elsewhere in your company. So, your Learning Management System must give you the option to update copy across the board. Make sure courses, instructions, labels, and titles sound like you!
Creating Custom Email Alerts
While we’re on the topic of communication, let’s talk about custom email alerts. Your Learning Management System will almost certainly come with the option to send out emails to your learners.
For instance – you might want to promote a new course or training option or make folks aware of an in-course event such as an online workshop session. Make sure you’re able to customise these emails down to the letter, using your company language, or to make them as enticing and exciting as possible.
It sounds like a basic thing, but it’s so important to keep folks interested in their eLearning journey and the possibilities open to them.
Do I Need A Modular Build LMS?
Possibilities are at the heart of learning, and it is this wide, fantastic world that makes creating a single LMS platform that works for all, straight out of the box, basically impossible. But fear not. Rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into using a rigid framework for eLearning, pick out a Learning Management System that offers Modular Build.
Starting with a solid software product that can be augmented with extra features, you’ll be able to tailor online learning to everyone. With a modular build LMS, administrators can add, or switch off, all sorts of elements to a course that means only the most useful or relevant stuff gets delivered to the student in a format they react positively to.
Customising Learning Journeys
The option to customise learning paths is definitely something you should ensure your LMS offers. This customisation area is crucial because not everyone learns at the same pace, and not everyone takes a linear approach to their learning either.
With a Learning Management System that helps you open up a broad range of attractive training options, you’ll boost interaction with courses and modules that suit your teams. In addition, the flexibility to alter permissions within the software will make sure you’re not restricting users from creating their own learning experiences. Unfortunately, this scenario can lead to frustrated learners flunking courses or dropping out entirely.
Is Gamification Important?
Yes! In truth, some topics, however necessary, just aren’t that fun to discover. However, gamification is a current and growing trend in eLearning that can transform dull content into something enjoyable. And if something is satisfying, you’ll find course uptake is high, and the results tend to improve. Plus, if something is interesting but complex, breaking it down into microlearning chunks can boost enjoyment too. The ability to create micro and game-based modules are a must on your LMS checklist.
You should also be looking at a Learning Management System that encourages healthy competition between teams or individuals. This might take the form of things to win, such as badges or points or rankings on a leaderboard – a feature that tends to be popular with learners. Lots of options to customise these kinds of things will go a long way to creating valuable training content.
Include Social Learning Features
And talking of teams, you’ll want your LMS to allow you to offer some social features to your online learning content. Some learners do well independently, choosing to study alone from course materials at their own pace. However, others find their training more compelling or exciting if they can bounce ideas off of others.
A Learning Management System that offers your admins a way to open up discussion boards, chatrooms, live video or forums will present multiple pathways for social learning to happen, which can often lead to genuinely creative and positive outcomes!
User-Generated Content Is Useful Content
This neatly brings us to User Generated Content. You’ve invested in an LMS to deliver quality training to your employees, but don’t forget that the experience can be a two-way street. There may be eLearning content you want to disseminate from the top-down, which is pretty straightforward (Health and Safety rules, for example), but there might be some learning areas where your people can share their expertise with each other.
Your L&D team can’t be expected to know every aspect of your company, and there will be plenty of staff with tips, tricks and helpful information that would benefit others. In this way, make sure your LMS has customising features that allow users to create content and share. It might be a list of acronyms they’ve developed to help them remember protocols, a handy spreadsheet or if you have a talented speaker, a short video that breaks down how to do something. Social features that let folks contribute are a brilliant feature of eLearning software, so don’t miss out on this area.
Freedom To Customise Makes For Great eLearning
Hopefully, we’ve made a strong case for customising your Learning Management System. There are many ways to attract learners to courses, keep them on board, and guide them happily toward success. It might be tempting just to adopt a basic Learning Management System because it seems like a no-hassle situation. But an LMS like that doesn’t give you much flexibility, so the results will likely be a bit disappointing when you roll it out.
The best online learning experiences tend to be varied, creative, and present clear goals that relate to your organisation. If this is twinned with the principles of your company, both visually and content-wise, you’ll be onto a winner. An LMS that offers you the freedom to customise eLearning routes and destinations is the ideal tool for quality training and results.