10 Problems You Can Solve With a Learning Management System

The shiny new tool in the world of e-teaching- Learning Management System.

Having trouble organising the online classes of various subjects for various grades? Losing track of your study materials or your student records?

What if we told you there is a miraculous solution?

Learning Management System. What is it? How does it revolutionize the haphazard world of online education? How can it solve all your e-teaching problems? Keep reading. 

It’s no use denying the fact that education in India has suffered a blow because of the pandemic. 

With State Level schools, the situation has been worse. Though teachers were ready to take Zoom classes, no arrangements were made to facilitate this. To help them accommodate a large population of students in those classes. 

Online coaching classes were even more of a nightmare. Tutors had to accommodate students of various schools with varied syllabi into the same time slot. 

You can tame the chaotic Wild West of online classes with an LMS.

What is an LMS? 

L- Learning 

M- Management 

S- System 

But, 

What is a Learning Management System? 

I know it sounds complicated but trust me, you’ve already heard of some of these. 

If you’ve ever watched this show,

…you know about Unacademy. 

(Kota Factory did more for Unacademy than ZooZoos did for Vodafone.)

Unacademy was an e-learning platform that was founded in 2015 and is worth $4.5 billion as of September 2020. 

Besides Unacademy, you might have also heard of UrbanPro, Coursera, and Skillshare. 

But looking at Unacademy itself can tell us a lot about what Learning Management Systems are and why they are so successful. 

According to Wikipedia, 

“A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.”

This might seem like a complicated definition but it isn’t. 

A Learning Management System is essentially a platform that helps you make sense of the chaotic and fragmented online education system. 

Say you have a school with 50 teachers and 2500 students. 

Presently those 50 teachers are taking 2 classes each per day. 

Can you monitor all those 100 classes? Can you ensure that the quality of teaching is being maintained throughout? 

Obviously not.

And if you are a student, how do you get the class notes if you are absent for a day? 

You probably have to depend on your friend’s notes which might be incomplete or flawed. And even at its best, secondhand class notes are never going to replace the experience of listening to the teacher’s lecture. 

A Learning Management System can solve all your problems. 

10 Problems You Can Solve With a Learning Management System

Let us solve one problem at a time with LMS. 

Teach multiple classes at once

LMSs are depositories of learning materials. This basically means that it contains classes, study materials, and tests on every chapter of every subject that an institution wants to teach. 

In real schools, you have to stick with a pre-planned schedule which is notoriously inflexible. Here, however, if you want to switch to a class on “Sound” right after you have studied “Force”, even though “Light” usually comes in the middle- you can. 

Learning Management Systems have Live Classes and Recorded Classes both (the live classes are all recorded). Therefore, you can move forward and backward according to your wishes. 

If you are an exceptionally fast learner, you can even sneak in some extra classes to stay ahead of your friends. And if you’re someone who prefers to dive deep within your lessons, you can decide to catch up with your friends a bit later after you’ve immersed yourself in one topic. 

Learning Management Systems do give you a schedule but this is not meant to bind or limit you. You have a lot more wiggle room here even if your school or institution has a strict time frame in mind. 

The lectures on “Force”, “Light”, and “Sound” are all listed before you in an LMS. All you need to do is choose which one to click on. 

Record all your classes 

Stage fright is not just applicable for stages. Asking your teacher a question can be justifiably intimidating. 

Has she answered it already? Did I miss it?

Well, with Learning Management Systems, you can just check. 

As we’ve said before, the live classes are all recorded and stored in the LMS. You can easily go back to a particular class and skip to the exact minute when the teacher was explaining that particular part that you missed out on. 

Also, unfortunately, a lot of students have missed out on a sizable chunk of school classes because someone in their family or they themselves were down with COVID-19. It’s not possible to ask for 15 days worth of class notes.

But with a Learning Management System, you won’t feel like you have missed out on anything at all. Just recover and start where you left off. The recorded classes will be waiting for you. 

You can monitor the teaching quality with Learning Management Systems

You cannot sit through a hundred classes in a day. And even if you ask the teachers to record their Zoom classes, recording and storing each is a hassle. 

An LMS makes the process of recording and storing the classes a piece of cake. Once you have a hundred video thumbnails at your disposal, you can easily click away and check if the content lives up to your expectations. 

You can also track which of your teachers are performing better i.e. drawing in more students, and offer them incentives. 

Study materials are always available on the Learning Management System

Why do you think remote learning boards like NIOS and even regular ones like CBSE have websites where their entire syllabus and study materials are uploaded regularly? 

Because there should be a uniform standard of teaching throughout the board. A particular group of students should not miss out on good study materials because of one negligent teacher. Moreover, it should not be an individual teacher’s responsibility at all to ensure that each student is in possession of the study material. 

It’s quite possible to miss out on these handouts or email attachments if there isn’t a collective database that stores these study materials. 

A Learning Management System stores away all the relevant information that it is fed so that these remain at the students’ disposal forever. 

Gone are the days when you could say “Sir, I must not have received the photocopy of the essay that you handed out.” 

That excuse is not going to fly anymore, kid. The essay’s right there in the system. 

Easily maintain student attendance records

Never taken attendance in an online class? Oh, you sweet summer child! 

Online attendance count is as hard as offline attendance count is easy. 

Some kids don’t respond because they can’t hear you. You cannot hear some kids’ responses because of a sound lag. Some respond too late. The nervous Nellies respond too early. 

It ends with you wanting to tear your hair out. 

And then you have to do it all over again at the end of the class because your supervisor keeps telling you that some students leave in the middle of the class. 

What if we told you it doesn’t have to be your responsibility anymore?

You focus on teaching to your heart’s content and the LMS will handle the attendance tracking. Online activity is easy to monitor when you are logged into the system. 

The LMS also maintains meticulous attendance records for you so that you can go and check. You can be way more specific with your data here than you could ever dream of doing manually. 

For example, an LMS will tell you, to the very second, what amount of time a student spent in a certain class. This enables you to improve the quality of your own teaching or pinpoint which teaching methods are drawing in the most audience. 

Keep parents in the loop with Learning Management Systems

There once was a time when you could send off your darling child to school and rest assured that the teachers’ carrot-and-stick methods would either encourage or frighten your child into learning their lessons. 

Unfortunately, the same is not possible for online classes. Since most children have no sense of self-discipline, it’s mostly up to you to ensure that they’re not slacking off. 

But how can you ensure that your beloved bite-sized-pack-of-mischief is doing his homework if you do not know what his homework for the day is? 

With an LMS, your child’s homework, class schedules, lesson plans, exam schedules, every single detail- will be at your disposal. 

The uniformity of teaching that an LMS provides, both in terms of quality and content, is not something any parent can expect from individual teachers at a school. 

There’s no wall barring you from witnessing the quality of education that your child is receiving in a Learning Management System. 

Also, your kid can no longer hide his teacher’s remarks from you. If you wish, his scores and remarks will be sent straight to you. 

Reach out to more students 

The local approach made sense when students actually had to visit your house (or vice versa) for the classes. But why remain limited to the students of your locality now that you’re taking online classes anyway? 

You might have relied on word-of-mouth recommendations before but that’s still locally limiting. 

Try something better. 

If you start teaching for an LMS, the number of your students is going to rise exponentially. Not only will you be teaching students of various other states, but you will also be teaching students belonging to various other economic classes. 

That’s great news for you if you live in an area where you cannot demand an exorbitant amount of money for your coaching classes. 

There’s an added bonus too. If you can draw in more students, the LMS will offer you added incentives. This is not something you can expect from a school with a flat salary. 

Implement diverse forms of student assessment

If there’s one element of online education that almost everyone is upset with, it’s the online examinations. 

A three-hour exam is never easy but it is even more difficult when you have to make a random switch from writing on a piece of paper to typing incessantly. 

Why not switch it up? 

Rather than having long three-hour written exams, you can design a diverse array of testing methods through a Learning Management System. 

MCQs, short quizzes, video quizzes, questionnaires, and so many other options! 

Have you ever noticed something? Kids hate sitting down for longer exams but they love pop quizzes? Especially because these give them the instant gratification of getting an answer correct and being praised for it. 

Teachers can use their imagination to make learning fun for the students and to make teaching fun for themselves. 

Through LMS, you can also track which kind of assessment methods are preferred by the students and focus specifically on developing those. 

Access students from remote areas

This is a point that was highlighted in Kota Factory time and again. 

Jeetu Bhaiya kept telling everyone: You do not need Kota as long as you have Unacademy installed on your phones. 

Website and app-based LMSs bring teachers like Jeetu Bhaiya into your very study room, regardless of whether you are living in Kota or Kolkata, or Kalahandi. 

Good teachers are not dime a dozen. And they often aren’t available in your locality. 

And it’s not just about teachers. If you live in a remote area, getting study materials and books might be a great hassle. 

But as long as you have a phone and a half-decent internet connection, you can access the same NEET coaching classes that Rohit from Delhi is spending 3 lakhs on. 

The parity of education that LMS offers is a much-desired boon. 

Learning Management System prevents customer acquisition loss

Say you run a coaching facility where you have a few hired teachers who are supposed to give you a percentage of their earnings because you connected them with students. 

If those students want to recommend those teachers to their friends, you will obviously get cut out of the equation. 

It might seem like a mutually beneficial plan at first but it is messy and hard to keep track of. 

With an LMS, you can advertise the profiles of your various teachers on a single platform so that students can simply pick whosoever they like. Their areas of expertise, their experience, and student ratings will all be displayed below so that the new students can make an informed choice. 

How does this help the students? They no longer have to depend on the solitary recommendation of one of their friends. The LMS presents them with a lot more options. 

How does this help the teachers? They no longer have to depend on a few recommendations. If their profiles are advertised in an LMS, they’re going to receive a lot more exposure. 

How does this help you as the owner of the institution?

You can stop missing out on students. You can also keep track of which of the Learning Management System features, assessment methods, etc are more popular with the students so that you can improve upon them. 

Also, there’s no fear of missing out on payments since the LMS keeps track of those for you. 

In Conclusion

10 problems? 1 solution. 

LMS. 

No, seriously. Education will never be what it used to be in the pre-pandemic world. 

Even if schools open up again, parents are going to remember just how much more convenient online coaching classes are compared to the hassle of taking their children to seven different tuition classes in seven different corners of the city. 

More and more students are going to shift over to online education simply because it saves up on travel time and is a lot more cost-effective. 

But as we said before, the conditions under which you are cooking determine whether you’re enjoying the cooking experience and whether you’re going to produce good food. 

An LMS is going to reign in all the chaos of online education and present it to the institution heads, the teachers, and the students in a neat little package with a bow. 

There are tons of other advantages of a Learning Management System. So there’s absolutely no reason why you should not plan to switch to one instead of remaining stuck with haphazard online classes. 

Have any other queries about LMS? Do let us know in the comments below! 

Frequently Asked Questions