A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the documentation, administration, tracking, automation, reporting, and delivery of training programs, educational courses, or learning and development courses. Therefore, incorporating it with different software to enhance user experience is called LMS integration.
You might have internal applications that already earn high user engagement or platforms utilized by users to interact within their day-to-day businesses. LMS integrations by Docebo tap into the solace of familiarity by systems your users have already experienced, ranging from social media to file sharing. An LMS works at its full potential when integrated with the existing applications and user platforms. These integrations improve the performance of an LMS, enabling you to transfer data among different systems to automate duties and improve the user experience.
Why do I need them?
It becomes imperative for businesses to adopt new software solutions and technology when expanding to stay competitive in the market. And, LMS integrations open endless possibilities for your business. Integrating them with your LMS also optimizes time, decreases manual labour, delivers a better depth of reports, and increases the breadth of content.
Rich data within each app used in your business helps you better understand your partners, customers, and colleagues when that data communicates with your training software. Some of the benefits it includes are:
- Customized training
Using integration helps you comprehensively summarise each learner’s performance, creating a customized training course based on your learners’ training overall unique needs and gaps.
- Time optimization
Third-party and local LMS integrations enable you to create functionality and automate manual tasks that traditionally took more time and work. Automatically add users to email lists, and tracking and reporting failed quiz attempts for a specific course are a few examples of workflows that can be developed using these integrations.
- Reduce repetitive data
While integrating a Learning Management System with other apps, you only have to load data once rather than update each system separately. This ensures information consistency within the organization, and you spend less time on data input and maintenance.
- Improved reporting
While integrating a Learning Management System with other apps, you acquire total clarity of training information, providing you with the command to relate performance outcomes with training data. Therefore, synchronizing data between systems provides a complete training activity report and analysis.
- Keep compliance more effective
When systems integrate users to have constant access to the data, they need to get insights on who is compliant and not. This protects the business from bulky fines and other legal effects and allows you to prove compliance and meet the unavoidable audits in a prepared way.
Types of LMS integration
Apps that blend with online training platforms to boost collaboration, ease accessibility, and the link between L&D and organizational performance benefit them in several ways, as mentioned above. But bringing all aspects in just one form is quite difficult. Thus, here is a list of a wide array of LMS integrations.
- Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system integration in LMS allows you to create and avail yourself of courses using a single tool. This assures that everything is compatible with other standards. With its use, one can reuse existing content and store them in a centralized location so that learners can access them when they want. However, while choosing the suitable CMS for your business, consider ease of use, security, and customizability as the most critical factors.
- eCommerce
If you have a business selling training content online, then eCommerce LMS integrations are essential. These integrations cover everything from conversion reports and sales to payroll so users can maximize revenues and build a brand.
Customer, sales order, and connections data from an online platform are automatically entered into your back-office accounting system or ERP. Ecommerce integrations are pretty simple and take a couple of minutes to set up and provide user-friendly payment options. Moreover, some organizations prefer to sell more developed consumer education resources to yield extra revenue.
- API
API or Application Programming Interface is an LMS integration that is a booster in the processes. It provides a configuration for developers to operate applications. Rather than leaving isolated, API connects a company database to other internal systems by making the manual steps automatic, thus speeding up processes.
This integration is a resourceful tool but vulnerable as well; therefore, the verification and security of API integrations are imperative in safeguarding the data from potential hackers. Moreover, each API has a set of credentials, just like a username and a password.
- CRM
While the content management system helps you create content for your customers or employees, customer relationship management (CRM) helps track customers’ experiences. Both tools are used together simultaneously.
CRM is a crucial tool that systematizes scattered data of users and performs analysis to make your decision-making process easy.
They also enable you to designate customized online training plans for customer and sales service based on their knowledge gaps and business objectives. CRM also facilitates better communication with leads and customers using an LMS with CRM and automates specific processes.
- Single Sign-on
Single sign-on (SSO) is a time-optimizing LMS integration that lets the training team log in once and access the entire software. In other words, users can sign in to the digital platforms and training portal using identical login credentials. SSO saves your time and protects your data from potential hacks.
You can save IT costs and get away with password fatigue. Other benefits of SSO integration are reduced IT costs and risk as it helps you choose hard-to-guess tricky passwords. Simultaneously make admins feel comfortable acknowledging that only those with the right privileges can access accounts.
Therefore, it is the perfect tool to centralize access management, maintain security, and prevent data breaches.
- Social media
In this digital era, you can’t avoid social networking platforms. Integrating social media with an LMS enables you to promote informal learning culture among the learners, from online discussion to virtual training resource sharing. Hence, social media integration offers plenty of factors to eLearning programs.
Moreover, you can also collect helpful eLearning feedback from online learners through online polls and quizzes. Other features offered by social media platforms are online posts, newsfeeds, live chats, social community, groups, etc..
- Web conferencing
Doubtlessly, virtual video training is the most compelling way to bring learners together and get them more involved individually. So the integration of web conferencing tools in an LMS helps to connect web conferencing software to increase participation and manage live events. It allows sharing experiences, asking questions, and getting insights to inspire remote colleagues to bond better and learn faster.
Conclusion
In the long run, the viability of an LMS is usually as much about its technical integrations as the content it provides. Despite these many valuable traits and benefits, many challenges are faced during LMS integration. But, without integrations, it’s hard to equip stakeholders with meaningful benchmarks about the influence of both online training and the project on your business.
