17 LMS Must-haves for Effective Classroom Training

It's the Christmas season, and what better time for wants and wish lists than this. It's also the time of the year to retrospect and look at what has been done and what's not, what you have and what you don't. The perfect time for listing some LMS Classroom Training Must-haves then!

Classroom training has often been considered exclusive and stand alone; for conducting face-to-face Instructor-led sessions only. However, with the evolution of technology, adoption of new learning models, shrinking learner attention spans, emergence of the multi-device world, growing competition, amongst other factors, Classroom Training, also called as Instructor Led Training (ILT), has undergone a sea change.

A successful Classroom Training requires considerable investment of time and effort. Learning Management Systems, with their ability to manage training schedules, handle venue and vendor management, keep an eye on training costs, help in creating, managing and delivering face-to-face training programs effortlessly.

But 'effortless' is not good enough when you want your training to be holistic and sticky. You need to make it 'effective'.

Pre- & post-assessments, bite-sized learning, social learning, knowledge collaboration, pre-defined workflows, auto-notification, easy access to additional references etc. help in enhancing the ILT experience and making it effective.

Here's a Santa's list of LMS Classroom Training Must-haves from the point of view of the LMS Administrators and Learners.

Administrative Features

‍A good LMS should aid administrators in organizing and conducting Classroom Training sessions for their learners with utmost ease, and to that extent should enable them to the do the following:

1. Inventory Management: An LMS should allow the administrators to manage the inventory of materials available at different training venues and also provide the authority to create and manage the list(s).

2. Curriculum Building: An LMS should allow the administrators to build training curriculums including ILT session(s) and other learning elements like reference material, surveys, online exams, videos, eLearning courses etc.

3. Session Management: ILT session creation should be simple and reusable. For instance, admin should have the freedom to assign it to any one or multiple curriculums to any user, with flexibility to conduct multiple batches on different dates and time as needed. The system should also put the learners into a waitlist in case the maximum amount of session participation is reached. The learners should then be enrolled to the course/session automatically as and when free seats are available.

4. Training Provider Management: It should organize and manage training programs under various categories and keep a record of internal and external training providers.

5. Nomination and Cancellation: Administrators should be allowed to manage all nomination and cancellation requests for individual users and required batch(es), and also to set up last dates for nomination and or cancellation in the curriculum.

6. Batch Management: Admins should be able to create multiple batches for each ILT session with details like start date and end date, batch time, holidays, vendor, venue and speaker and also assign users to the required batch(es).

7. Attendance: Admins should have the right to mark attendance for completed curriculums.

8. MIS & Reporting: Reports on learners that have attended a particular Classroom session, session progress etc. should be available to the Admin for drawing business intelligence and taking corrective actions, if required.

In addition, the system should also indicate the cost, training hours and attach certificate, if need be.

Learner-side Features

‍Learners should be able to carry out the below mentioned functions across a wide range of devices, namely desktops, tablets and smartphones:

1. Learner Catalog: Learners should be able to check out available training curriculums in the catalog.

2. Marking Attendance: They should be allowed to mark the completion of ILT sessions or leave it to administrators to mark attendance.

3. Nomination Workflows: Learners should be allowed to nominate self for any classroom training courses from their catalog. The system needs to provide necessary approval workflows along with an ability for Reporting managers to nominate team members for classroom training.

4. Batch Management: Learners should be able to easily enroll for a suitable batch or change/cancel an already assigned batch, request for another batch later, and to effortlessly navigate and view the details of the curriculum assigned to them. System can provide configurability to administrators to make the approval process as manual or automate it.

5. Notifications: LMSs should also have facility to trigger email notifications for important events in order to keep the learners updated with the actions taken on the batch, they have requested or which is assigned to them and also be notified about the enrollment status in case they have been waitlisted.

6. Knowledge Collaboration: Learners should have the ability to collaborate and take the learning curve towards personal development through Discussion Forums, Communities, etc.

7. Social Learning: The learners should be allowed to learn from each other through the means of social media tools like micro-blogging, twitter etc.

8. Flipped Classroom: An LMS should also support the Flipped Classroom concept by delivering the correct references for any particular course at any particular point.

9. Assessment: An LMS should have different levels to analyze the learner's actual understanding. Pre-assessments to help them examine their existing knowledge, additional learning material available in the LMS (automated response) can be then accessed based on the amount of learning that they need to catch up with. Once the ILT is conducted, a post-assessment can be done to study the areas where there is scope for improvement both in terms of instruction and learning capacity.

All of the aforementioned must-haves do not discount the role that the instructor plays in imparting knowledge and training. Ultimately, using an LMS for Classroom Training should leverage the strengths of traditional face-to-face training and online learning in order to deliver an extraordinary learning experience to the learners and make the overall process effective.

Over the years, we have been a Santa to many organizations across the globe; helping them better their learning management with new LMS features and functionalities through our Best Value, SaaS Learning Management System, UpsideLMS.

So, are you ready to be the good Santa?