The end of the year is right around the corner. Now is a great time to clean up your Learning Management System (LMS) and make sure you are getting the best value out of your investment.
Here are some end-of-year activities that will help with planning and execution in the new year.
Audit Your Content
It’s so easy to forget the “test” courses and users that have been created in an LMS. It’s even easier to forget about the updates to current courses that need to be done to align with new products, strategies, or even branding.
The end of the year is a great time to document the courses currently in your LMS and map out things such as:
· Competency Area
· Onboarding Phase
· Roles
· Format
· Content Owner
· Internal/External
· Assessment Required?
· Assessment Type
· Updates Needed?
· Status (Draft/Active/Archive)
Document using an Excel Worksheet or Google Sheets. Be sure to include any other requirements that are applicable to your organization. Then start adding your courses to this document. You’ll have the functionality to filter and sort through this information to easily see what needs to be updated and corrected.
The good news is that a document like this only needs to be created once. After it is created, you’ll simply be updating throughout the year as items are added or modified.
Review your Roadmap
Once you’ve audited the content in your LMS, updating your roadmap to include content updates should be straightforward. You’ll want to create a plan that includes which content will be updated in the coming year and who will lead those individual projects.
This updated plan should include who will lead the update for each piece of content, a timeline of deliverables, and a prioritization of content updates.
Update Your Users
Reviewing your user list is also another great end-of-year LMS activity. Depending on how your platform was set up, there may be incorrect user information.
Use the end of the year to update roles, organization hierarchy, team reporting structure, and general user information. If you’re not actively removing users as they leave your organization, now would be the time to remove them from your LMS and open up some licenses.
Making sure this information is correct in your LMS will pay off in better reporting and an improved learning assignment process.
Review Software Releases
LMS platforms will usually have several releases throughout the year. Take some time to read the release notes and see what changes and enhancements have been made to the platform.
You’ve spent a lot of money to have an LMS, be sure that you are maximizing the value by becoming aware of the new features and updates that LMS companies offer.
You never know – that one feature of your LMS that you’ve always wanted to see may have been released, and you weren’t aware of it.
Pull Reports for Utilization and Training Completion
You will be asked to show the data for your LMS at some point. This is usually asked to justify the cost of the software. One of the best ways to do this is to pull the utilization and training reports.
You can easily see how often people are using the LMS and what’s the completion rate for the training in the platform.
Pulling this report can help to guide your roadmap. If certain courses show higher completion rates, you may want to investigate why and how you can use this information to increase completion across all of your courses. Suppose a particular department uses the platform more than others. In that case, you can look into why and see if you can integrate some of those behaviors into other departments in the company.
There is knowledge in the data. Pull the reports, find out what’s happening in your LMS, and try to replicate positive behaviors.
Conclusion
The end of the year is a great time to reflect and plan. Commit to at least one of these activities and prepare to go into the new year with an actionable plan and vision for how to make the best out of your LMS.