Confused about what you should be looking for when choosing a Learning Management System? Let us help you out by running through some must have features, so you are prepared as you head into the market.

You’ve heard people talking about Learning Management Systems (LMSs) for a while now, but you’re still not sure if or why you’d need one or what it can do for you. Don’t worry, when it comes to choosing a Learning Management System you’re not alone.

If you google “LMS” you will be slapped in the face with pages and pages of search results that will probably leave you much more confused than when you started, and it doesn’t need to be that hard.

A Learning Management System, or LMS as they are more commonly known, is a platform that allows you to store courses or content to train or educate your team, employees, or customers. There are currently hundreds if not thousands of Learning Management Systems on the market at the moment, but choosing the right Learning Management System for you could be the difference in saving a lot of time and money or causing you some extreme headaches.

Not all Learning Management System systems have the same offerings, so it’s important to do your research to ensure that the product that you are signing up for can fulfill all of your needs. We are going to look at some of the features that you should look out for when making a decision about choosing a Learning Management System in this article to give you an idea of what a good system should be able to do for you.


You should be able to store all of your course content within your Learning Management System for no extra charge. This includes all video and audio content, meaning that you can have all of your learning materials in one place as opposed to being hosted on a range of websites you then need to keep track of.

Mobile learning is the way of the future and if you can’t access your content through a mobile device or tablet you are drastically limiting the way that your users can learn. Bite size learning, or learning via short modules that make up a course is becoming more popular with time and being able to learn anywhere anytime means that if you have a 15mins you can learn something new.

Unlike traditional classroom based learning, with a Learning Management System users can learn at their own pace to ensure that they understand material before jumping to the next module. This isn’t to say that we are allowing learners to take months to complete a course, you can still set deadlines for courses to keep users moving along their learning pathway, but they won’t be rushed through the process because they only have a few hours in a training room to digest weeks’ worth of information.

Signing up with a Learning Management System shouldn’t mean throwing out all of your current training material because it’s too hard to recreate in your Learning Management System. Creating new courses and making use of old training material should be a simple process. Some Learning Management Systems have developed course creation tools that let you build modules in a visual way similar to that of web development tools like Squarespace. Having that visual editing tool lets the content creator see exactly what the user will see as they move through the course, and its intuitive design means that minimal backed knowledge of the system is required.

Learning pathways are the easiest way to implement a professional development plan. A learning pathway consists of a series of courses specific to the learner to ensure that any content that they are spending time learning is actually relevant to them or their department. Learning pathways are simple to create a much higher level on engagement with learners by clearly establishing a direction rather assigning courses at will.

Depending on which Learning Management System you decide to use, you may be able to access courses for free. This can play a major part in the decision making process though. If you are looking to take advantage of an extensive course marketplace stacked with courses from accredited providers, make sure that your Learning Management System has the right partnerships to provide the content that you need. If you are running with the best system for your needs, almost every course that you will ever need should be found in the one place and be available with the click of a button.

Why should you have to have a completely separate system just for your learning materials that has someone else’s logo plastered all over it? You shouldn’t. You should be able to easily include your company logos, match color schemes and design, and even embed your training platform into your current website.

Every Learning Management System tells you that they have great reporting functionality, but can you find the information that you want? Rather than only providing a basic set of standard reports for administrators to access, you should be able to choose which information you’d like to see, along with the format that you’d like to see it. Reporting is one of the most important areas for any training manager, so make sure that the system you choose can provide all of the information you require without leading you to a nervous breakdown once a month.


You shouldn’t need to spend crazy amounts of money to get your Learning Management System set up. For as low as $1 per user per month you should be able to provide the best online training for your team. Compared to onsite training, if you have an organization of more than 100 people, switching to a Learning Management System to streamline your processes can save you up to $500,000 every year!

For more insights, subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

False

Looking for a Learning Management System? 9 things to consider if you’re new to the LMS World

Three financial service business directors are in a car which crashes. When they meet St Peter he asks “Did you have a business continuity plan that would work?”

There are over 20 policies and procedures a financial services business should have in place and a business continuity planning is one of them.

Preparing for disaster is not a popular task. This lack of preparedness not only threatens the viability of sectors around the world but also jeopardises the delivery of critical goods and services.

A business continuity plan should be a proactive process to ensure that the critical advisory businesses services or products are delivered during a disruption. It is worth documenting and implementing a plan that works for the business, staff and clients and not a canned solution to please the regulator.

Your business continuity plan (BCP) should include the following

• Plans for disaster or adverse event
• Measures to be taken
• Arrangements
• Identification of necessary resources ( including personnel, information, equipment, financial allocations, infrastructure protection and accommodations)

A well laid-out policy and procedure manual will help inform employees and also allow the financial services business to operate more efficiently and effectively, and a policy and procedures manual should be drawn up and distributed on an intranet to all employees.

An example of the effectiveness of having such a plan was shown when the Lion of Africa Insurance company had a fire that started around 2am on Saturday, 5th October 2013. By early morning, members of the emergency management team were onsite to assess the extent of the damage and coordinate the recovery process.

The BCP was immediately invoked and by midday, an official communication was sent out to all staff members and external parties informing them of the fire incident. The communication also reassured all concerned parties that business would continue as usual with no service interruption whatsoever. Due to this plan, on Monday 7th of October business continued uninterrupted.

Should the business continuity plan be prepared in fear of breaching compliance, or should it be completed to avoid risk?

The answer is all of the above. It’s also critical when preparing your business continuity plan to include the business managers, and reach out to staff members to gain their input. It is the responsibility of the board to see that such a plan exists. Emergency evacuation plans should be practiced so staff know what to expect if a disaster hits.

Business continuity plans are one of the speciality courses offered Naked Mindz through the Go1 platform.
You can enroll in our Business Continuity course by CLICKING HERE

Does your business have a continuity plan?

When should learning start for a new employee? Unless you have a thing for watching employees sit around being unproductive (and bored), the correct answer is as soon as humanly possible.

Traditionally, this is usually done from Day 1, because you've got to organise a sit-down course, rope in an instructor, book a place to run the course, prepare assessments to make sure that the material has sunk in and at the end of it all, get some feedback on how your new hire found the whole ordeal.

Luckily, you don't have to be traditional any more. You're the modern HR pro, and you have access to technology.

Here's why you absolutely need to use some form of learning technology in your onboarding process.

No more preparation time or paperwork filing

For those who don't know HROnboard, we're the employee onboarding software guys & gals. Our customers commonly use us to kill their reliance on manually preparing job offers, contracts and policies in the offer process, which saves a bunch of time, reduces the chance of manual errors and makes the whole process much faster and more transparent.

By including learning in the employee onboarding process, you can similarly remove all the learning documents, paperwork and filing by placing it online. By using a tool like Go1, you'll always have access to all records and courses online, which is much easier to manage and maintain.

Forget the instructors, forget the paperwork, and forget the traditional, boring office education environment.
By giving employees access to their courses online, you no longer need them to be with you to complete their training courses.

Not only is this great for you (new employees will already be ready to get stuck into work on Day 1), but it also gives new employees the flexibility to complete courses at their own pace, on their own device, in a more comfortable environment.

Create, update and improve your courses on the fly

Need to add in a few new bits of information to your course? Instead of re-drafting, printing and distributing courses, you can make a few clicks online and be done with it.

One effective way to manage your courses is to develop basic programs, then add additional elements or courses for specific roles and departments. That way, setting up courses will just involve selecting the role type and automatically sending the correct, up-to-date course materials for each new hire to complete.

Online courses are always much more engaging. You can make them fun, entertaining and a direct reflection of who you are as an employer.

Even if you don't have a dedicated course creator in your team, you can still configure an online course to match your branding, include all of your content in a dynamic and modern way and make the learning experience a positive one for each new hire.

Setting up your own employee onboarding & learning technology

You don't necessarily need to overhaul your entire onboarding process to get started. Start small - one or two courses, setup some links throughout your current onboarding process and get a feel for what you need.

Once you've made the switch, you'll never look back. Having a faster time to productivity and more engaged employees will be all the incentive you need to keep building and expanding your learning programs into the future!

HROnboard is cloud based employee onboarding software that helps organizations manage the job offer and new hire process. We now integrate with Go1 to provide an even more comprehensive employee onboarding experience, covering everything from learning to offer acceptance to tax forms.

Anne van der Wal is a HR Technology & Employee Onboarding Specialist at HROnboard

Why learning technology should be a part of employee onboarding

Selecting the right learning management system for your business isn't a decision that should be taken lightly. At Go1 we want to make sure our system meets all of your needs before you sign up. By creating an easy to use platform that integrates with all of your favorite programs, and having inline editing to make course creation simple, we have all of your learning bases covered!

Go1 is software that allows you to train your staff and customers. You can quickly create your own customizable courses, or use one our pre made courses in our growing marketplace of over 100,000+ courses to make learning easy. Whether it’s onboarding, compliance or selling courses, Go1 makes your training easy!

The most important eLearning tool that you can have is an LMS that meets your needs. Within our LMS Software we have a range of tools to enhance the learning experience including video, audio, text and interactive assessments so you can tailor your course to your staff.

Why not try Go1 Learning Management System?

Is your Learning & Development team working to up-skill your team members? If they are not, you are at risk of losing them! With more than half of the workforce stating that professional development contributes to their job satisfaction and can be a leading cause of work place stress, now is the time to invest in training your team.

Employees who derive meaning and significance from their work are more than 3 times as likely to stay with their organizations creating a more skilled and productive team, as well as developing a culture of learning in the workplace.

To find out more and sign up head to www.go1.com

Are you cultivating a learning culture in your workplace?

There are tools out there that let you build websites with simple drag and drop functionality, so why can't you do the same thing with creating online courses? Now you can with Go1 inline editing!

The latest update on the Go1 platform has made creating your own customized courses even easier by allowing administrators and creators to watch their course come to life as they are adding element. Similar to the tools that you are already familiar with on website building platforms like Squarespace, you can now use inline editing to add videos, documents, update text, images and more all within the same display view that your learner will be seeing.

You can find more about how inline editing works in this video.

After creating your course in the Administer dashboard, you no longer need to create any further content before clicking on the 'Learn' button and jumping straight into the learner view for your new course.

Once you have gone into your 'My Courses' tab on the left hand side LMS menu and selected your new course, you can then click on 'Review' to view and start adding/editing your content.

We can now see that there is no content in our new course yet. We can begin the editing and adding content by clicking on the 'Edit' button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

We have now enabled all of the editing featured on the page. To start we can click in the title area and begin entering a title and description for our course. We can even change the cover image for our course by clicking the area just below the header.

Below our header there is a box called '+ADD', this is where new content blocks can be added to the course.

Our first content option is text. In this block we can enter a title for the content we are about to add by simply clicking in the blank area at the top of the text box. Below that we can enter any text that we would like to include in this section as a part of the course.

The next item that we can add to our course is a document. We can still add a title and description of the document that we are adding, exactly the same way as mentioned above, but then we also have the ability to click the button below and upload a document. This could be a word doc, excel, powerpoint, etc. Once uploaded the doc will display in your course.

Our last item to add is video. Again we can add our title and description as per the text box mentioned above, but we can then click upload video to add a video resource to the course.

Any of the above blocks can be rearranged to be in your order of preference, and you can delete any blocks that you no long want to use by simply clicking on the trash can in the top right hand corner of each block.

With the addition of these tools creating and editing courses just got a whole lot easier for everyone!

If you have any problems or questions relating to your inline editing tools, please do not hesitate in contacting us at support@go1.com and we can guide you through the process.

Inline editing makes creating courses easier than ever!

Training new staff can be a costly and time consuming process, and with the way current markets are trending more companies will see more 25% staff turnover each year! Switching to a learning management system like GO1 means your onboarding costs can be reduced to a fraction of your current training expenses, and you will save weeks of training time!

To find out more and sign up for a free trial CLICK HERE

Is Staff Turnover Blowing Your Training Budget?

We have decided to trial a new release schedule. We will now we aiming for shorter release cycles every two weeks. This will enable us to get suggested improvements and updates out to users as well as release things in smaller changes.

As part of the blended learner experience in Go1, scheduled courses allow you to run a course as an event that has a specific date and location. To allow user to better find and enroll in the correct scheduled courses we have enhanced the filtering capabilities in this part of the system so users can now filter courses by start and end date as well as their location.

Project groups is a feature that allows for discussions between learners and course facilitators. Through group discussions, learners can ask questions and get help on course material. It also provides another format for administrators to assess learners understanding of the material.

In this release we added additions features to improve the ability to search and find groups as well as provide further moderation tools for administrations to manage groups.

For a full list of improvements and updates see the list below:

Improve management of archived project groups

Fix regression with course sharing not functioning correctly in v2.6.0

Show the correct currency symbol for a payment

Add ability to remove alternatives from multiple choice question

Portal admin can administer and delete custom project groups

When cloning a module, also clone the resource order so they are the same

Fix issue where the video cannot be played again after completely watching video

Add details of purchase in Stripe payment record description

Show feedback to user who has failed the quiz

Add date and location filters in Scheduled Courses page

Add ability for admin to edit tags on course

Go1 CEO Andrew Barnes was recently invited to DrupalGov Canberra 2016 where he spoke about how to use Drupal for learning management. DrupalGov is an organization promoting Drupal in the public sector, founded in 2013. They help passionate public-sector communities create opportunities for learning, networking and sharing their knowledge and experience with Drupal.

Having worked with the product since Drupal 4.6, Andrew and the Go1 team have been making some great advancements using the Drupal over many years. Throughout the presentation Andrew discusses a range of topic relating to using Drupal in Learning Management including the importance of learning, curating content, advantages of fostering a learning environment, H5P and new interactive learning experiences, assessing competency and much more.

You can watch Andrew's presentation here:

For more information and details on upcoming DrupalGov events head to http://drupalgov.org

It’s a fact of life that at some point one of your employees will share with you that they are expecting a baby. With women making up close to half of the workforce you’re sure to have an excited employee share the news that she is pregnant. It is such an exciting time of their life and you, as their employer, need to be on board for the ride.

An employee will share their news with you orally during the first trimester so generally you should have between 4 and 6 months to prepare for a smooth transition. This seems like a lot of time but in reality this is a very quick process. This is the time where you and your employee will set in place a checklist of items you both need to adhere to in order for the transition to run smoothly. As their manager it is important that you have up to date information at all times so you can actively manage the next chapter of the employee’s life.

To help make this process easier, we have designed a course to take you through the steps in order to seamlessly manage a very exciting time in someone’s life. Managing an expecting employee involves a range of necessary checklists and paperwork. From establishing their due date, to making sure all paperwork is in order and effectively replacing them in the workplace with minimal disruption can be tricky. It’s important to get systems in place so that both employer and employee know what to expect from maternity leave.

This course will also help guide you through the steps and best practices to ensure the employees health and wellbeing is being looked after. It’s a very strenuous time in a woman’s life, so assisting in making your employee’s professional life as easy as possible will alleviate some of the stress of the overall pregnancy process. Together, you and your employee should be working towards a clearly defined (for both parties) and openly communicative working relationship in the days and months leading into the arrival of their child.

In addition to be providing your employee with a safe, comfortable and supportive work environment (before, during and after their pregnancy), it’s crucial that you are fully across the businesses own parental leave policies and procedures. Ensuring that your employee is satisfied with the working environment that they have been provided is important, however it’s equally important to accurately represent your organization, thus making sure that you have not promised something to your staff member that is outside of yours and the businesses reach.

During the maternity leave process it is imperative to have an open line of communication. So many unexpected things can arise in a women’s pregnancy that you will need to have flexibility and the ability to adapt to these situations. It may be health issues, to unexpected appointments, to extreme morning sickness, so having a flexible workforce planning strategy in place can assist both you and your employee. Being aware of this, whilst forecasting your staffing requirements will help you to avoid breakdowns in resourcing and service levels.

Having been through the maternity leave process twice myself, it was incredibly important to have a smooth transition. Knowing where I stood and what was expected of me in the workplace helped me to transition into motherhood seamlessly, without the stress of not knowing what was happening next. I was able to discuss matters with my employer and feel comfortable in the workplace. My health and safety was a top priority as I was one of those unfortunate women who’s pregnancy weren’t so smooth, but my employer always made it very clear that my health and my babies health was incredibly important to the organization.
I have recently entered the workforce again after having my second child and it was managed exceptionally well. The lines of communication were open and my employer was respectful of my needs, not only as an employee, but also as a mother of two small children.

This course is critical to organizations of all sizes, as the maternity leave process is one that needs to be well navigated. There is a lot of information out there for women who are expecting, but sometimes not enough is provided for the employer. It is important to remember that every situation is different and you, as the employer, need to have the knowledge in how to manage the process well. By doing this, you will be cultivating a supportive and hospitable workplace culture, one that will assist in staff retention and the reduction of attrition, which, as we know, is a win for all successful business.

Having an open dialogue with your employee will mean you will both know what to expect (when they are expecting) throughout the process, and may be more willing to negotiate coming back to the workplace. 

Why managers need training around maternity leave

Welcome to the Go1 blog. Helping you to achieve your L&D goals through the latest learning and development insights, trends, and technology.

Blog

petrol_green

Have you caught the latest episode of L&D in 20? Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now!