Is It Time To Move Onto A Unified Learning System?

As new challenges emerge, organizations look for new solutions and more often than not, end up bolting on a new system or software. Very often, the new system may be able to address some of the challenges faced, but in a very disjoint manner. Not only is such an experience frustrating for the end learners, but also for training administrators as the system is inefficient and can prove to be counter-productive.

The learners of today need and almost demand a wholesome learning experience which includes different channels of learning be it classroom-based, social, informal or self-paced. Today's learners also want to be able to choose the technology that they use to access their training material. This makes it difficult for organizations to manage learning, resulting in considerable time and efforts being put in to assign, moderate and monitor training interventions.

Let's consider a hypothetical example of an organization in the financial services sector. This organization deploys computer based eLearning courses for employees in the Banking Operations and Customer Service functions, but uses short video snippets accessible on mobile devices to train its Sales team. The company uses 'Best LMS' to manage and track its eLearning, and uses 'Best mLearning Platform' to manage and track its mLearning. Since both the platforms use different delivery models, it results in a lot of duplication of work. In this case, the organization will need to spend twice the amount of time to moderate or monitor the training as well as generate reports for analysis by management. Manual integration of the data compiled from two separate sources will increase the complexity of the process and also be very time consuming. However, if the organization is somehow able to unify its LMS and mLearning platform into a single robust system, it can save a considerable amount of time, effort and consequently costs.

A unified learning system can be an effective and efficient solution if it is able to do the following:

• Launch online courses
• Track course progress and completion
• Generate comprehensive reports
• Deliver 'just-in-time' performance support
• Content authoring
• Leverage mobile devices for social learning through the use of collaborative networks and multiple media types

A unified learning system will ideally ensure lower costs and clearer reporting. We believe that the time is right for learning management systems to evolve into unified learning systems and transform learning management as we know it.

What do you think? Is it time to move on to a Unified Learning System?