One of the major benefits of an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) is multiple hosting options. LMS administrators have the option to host their platform internally if they have the bandwidth and expertise. However, most organizations find it advantageous to work with a hosting partner that can manage the more complex aspects of the learning platform while saving significant costs in terms of staffing and productivity. It allows your team to focus more on providing engaging eLearning to constituents and less on the backend management of the platform.
So how do you determine whether your team can continue to host internally or if they’d benefit from open-source vendor support? Depending on the goals of your LMS administrators and your organization, a few key considerations can help lead you in the right direction – on the path to sustained performance and employee success.
Broader Horizons
With an open–source LMS you’re enabling support for your eLearning ideas and goals to extend beyond the means of your host alone and expand its reach to partners, fellow clients and developers.
This means you’re able to take advantage of a larger network of people with the same goal in mind, crafting solutions and tools to better the user learning experience. When you work with an LMS vendor, you’re able to benefit from their team’s collective experience with the learning platform. Having worked with many different types of clients over the years, this means that your vendor can recommend solutions or best practices that have worked for other organizations that have the same or similar goals as your own. Whether professional or personal, collaborative effort has an impact. We see greater change through the efforts of a collective force rather than a singular one.
In particular, with such widely used platforms like Moodle and Totara, there is a wide community of users to learn from. You can join community forums to interact and learn from the exploration and development other organizations are conducting. Or you can more easily rely on your LMS vendor to keep aware of instances of growth and the latest features and capabilities that may otherwise prove difficult to seek out alone.
Additionally, your LMS vendor, if they have a Certified Partner status with the open-source product headquarters, are closely involved with the funding and development of the product. This benefits you as Certified Partners will ask for the features and functionality that their clients need, giving you access to influence the direction of the product through your partner’s advocacy – a very important benefit to be sure.
Forging the way to a clearer path, organizations and LMS vendors can work together by being part of this community.
Service Networking
Another benefit to the open-source aspect of hosting an LMS is taking advantage of your vendor’s connections within the eLearning industry, particularly when you have a need that extends the traditional scope of the learning management system. While assessing a need or seeking resolution to a problem, your LMS vendor should be able to recommend additional tools or solutions that can help you meet your goal. For example, eThink is actively in touch behind the scenes with a network of vetted partners who can provide content,a service, or product to match a need or fill out a workflow that may involve the LMS as well as the larger learning ecosystem.
This knowledge of and relationship with companies that provide complimentary solutions that can meet clients’ needs enables a streamlined and consolidated approach to transitioning to a new learning system. What had once been new and unfamiliar then becomes extremely approachable.
Again, we find this collaborative approach enables us to detect recurring themes within each client’s framework and prepare for what may come sooner!
Expertise
Expounding further on the grounds of what we’ve discussed above, another result of receiving either full or part-time support for your open-source LMS is the ability to leverage expert level service. In this learning and training industry that grows so rapidly, we know the importance of being able to reply on a partner not only as a guide but as an advocate for your success!
eThink is a Certified Premium Moodle Partner and Platinum Totara Partner. Recognized as the 2018 Global Totara Platinum Partner of the Year, the 2019 North American Moodle Partner of the Year, a UK G-Cloud supplier, and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner, eThink provides a leading experience for both open-source learning solutions. These achievements and partnerships demonstrate our expertise in all things eLearning and our ability to help organizations create a powerful open-source learning solution that incorporates the industry’s most cutting edge tools, content, and best practices to provide successful training to end users.
We believe that what benefits one ultimately is constructive and conducive to the whole. Our team not only lends support but we impart the knowledge we have onto you.
If your current training program isn’t quite where you’d like it to be or you’re struggling with the bandwidth or expertise to support it, an open-source LMS solutions provider can greatly improve your training efforts and help reach and exceed the goals of your organization.
Contact eThink to explore how we might be able to help support your learning programs or click below to request an individual demonstration.
