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A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a software system designed to support teaching and learning in an online educational environment. Through online learning, companies can conduct their training anywhere, anytime, on a device connected to a network. VLE typically operates over the Internet and provides a collection of tools, such as trainee administration, uploading content, getting student work, communication, peer assessment, teacher’s assessment (e.g. multiple-choice questions), student grades and records, questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. Companies today have multiple benefits, as they can utilize e-learning systems using different formats, including text, audio, video, photos, presentations, PDF-s, tests, etc.
Due to its unique features in the acquisition of new knowledge, the general opinion is that e-learning offers the same possibilities as classical classroom teaching, with arguably more efficiency.
What is a Learning Management System?
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for:
- Administration, documentation, tracking and management of e-learning study and training programs
- Management of training content
- Reporting in the training process
- Online classroom and events, etc.
LMSs range from (professional training/ educational) records management systems - to online course delivery software with collaboration features. Corporate training uses learning management systems to automate record-keeping and employee registration. LMSs are largely used by the regulated industries (e.g., financial services and biopharma) for compliance training. They are also used by educational institutions to improve and support classroom instruction and offer courses to a larger population of students worldwide.
The components of a LMS include:
- Accounts management (e.g. trainee enrollment, self-registration, attendees preferences)
- Management of training resources (i.e. instructors, facilities, equipment, lecture files)
- Training workflow (e.g. user notification, manager’s approval, waiting list management)
- Online learning delivery process (e.g. computer-based training, reading and comprehension)
- Online assessments
- Management of continuous professional education (CPE)
- Collaborative learning (e.g. brainstorming, discussion topics, group tasks).
Most LMSs are web-based and facilitate access and administration of the learning content. Some providers include "performance management tools", which include employees’ assessment, competency management, skills gap analysis, promotion paths, and assessment by multiple factors (i.e., 360-degree reviews).
What are the benefits of having a good LMS?
Before adopting a new product, or service – the C-level management usually will ask for its price and for the benefits it will bring. When speaking about LMS – it is evident that it can save up to 45% of your organization time in comparison with classical classroom learning. Also – it will certainly reduce the costs (e.g. travel expenses to bring all attendees in a single place). Additional LMS benefits are listed below.
Flexible Remote Training
With a unified LMS, your employees can access the information they need securely, no matter their location - in the office, at home, traveling, or even traveling abroad. Having in mind the recent pandemic - providing employees with global access to knowledge-sharing resources will hugely benefit remote (and hybrid) workers.
Improved Organizational Processes
Every part of your company can improve its processes by utilizing a LMS system. You can use it to consolidate general processes and reduce bottlenecks, e.g. when having a limited number of employees with specific skills - unable to carry out multiple tasks. You will also reduce people's anxiety about not being able to find important data in the cloud space, having to navigate a heap of poorly managed files. Companies won’t need to create the same types of PowerPoints over and over again for the incoming employees.
Greater Productivity
No matter the department they work in, by using LMS - the employees can access all helpful content in one place. It will save them valuable time and assist them in answering customer questions. LMS will also reduce delays that might occur, for example, when employees need information from ‘knowledge holders’ - people who exclusively know or have access to particular material. LMS can become a central knowledge hub for all your information sources – CMSs, cloud storage, and databases.
Higher Employee Satisfaction
Accompanied with a good UX design, quizzes and gamification – LMS can provoke significant employee interest and engagement. Spending less time looking for important information will free up employees to do more beneficial, valuable work, such as providing better customer service.
Still, most of the available LMSs do not possess proper search capability needed for optimal knowledge management. Weakly designed or missing search functionality means that the employees are not able to find the information they need, which leads to wasted time and reduced productivity. A learning management system with a unified, well-designed search bar will bring together the content of all of a company’s knowledge bases.
What are the benefits if you upgrade your LMS with Omnisearch?
At Omnisearch, we offer a simple and effective tool for complete internal search of all types of content – audio, video and text (including pdfs). The focus of Omnisearch is educational and media portals. Trainees and attendees will highly benefit from our tools that transcribe audio into text and perform keyword-based content searches.
If you already possess an in-house LMS - integrating Omnisearch into it is rather simple. You can use the Omnisearch API to get the content into Omnisearch, and then write a JavaScript snippet to display the search results on your end. As always, the Omnisearch team is available to assist and guide you through the integration.
Regarding search organization - Omnisearch primarily focuses on use cases powering the search functionality on customers’ own sites, the so-called “site search” use cases. The content creators can embed Omnisearch into their site with ease. This makes us different from consumer-facing search engines like Google, and more akin to Algolia.
By using Omnisearch - you won’t need a particular technology dependency, (e.g. specific video hosting platform). Omnisearch supports hundreds of hosting platforms. Apart from that, there are no dependencies as to where the files need to be stored, they simply need to be ingested into Omnisearch through the Omnisearch API.
Finally, Omnisearch can search through all enrolled courses that use an Omnibox. Our Standard plan (and above) provides you with a single search bar that can search across all the courses in a single place, making it incredibly easy to navigate through materials.
Omnisearch tools can significantly improve your current LMS and will increase the overall trainee satisfaction. With our transcription and search tools - the functionality of your current LMS system will be enhanced, and you will gain positive feedback from your employees.
Feel free to contact us for a quick demo on how to improve your LMS platform.
