By James Oakley, eLearning Developer
Over the last couple of years, the practices of L&D departments using a Learning Management System (LMS) to administer their training content significantly changed. Frustrated with many of the limitations posed by relying on LMSs, which are often perceived as fixed and inflexible, coupled with the overall shift in many training cultures to provide individualized, learner-centric trainings, many companies have started replacing their LMS systems with a Learning Experience Platform (LXP).
It is hardly surprising that LXPs have risen to such prominence. Beyond possessing a far more enticing acronym than LMS, which is software that administers, manages, tracks, and reports the results of eLearning courses, an LXP offers far richer and engaging experiences for employees. In an LXP, a wide variety of learning content is pulled from different sources and made available based on machine-learning to craft training pathways entirely unique to the user. In addition, LXPs allow a learner to recommend and share relevant material to other users on their account or in employee channels, essentially creating an expanded and organic training ecosystem.
What a fully-optimized LXP can deliver is a cohesive culture of learning, free from the rigidity and somewhat stifling nature of an LMS. If an LMS delivers top-down training administered by L&D departments and Human Resources, an LXP is a bottom-up approach to career development crafted by users, for users.
Despite the many benefits of implementing an LXP, it is not a panacea, and there are certainly drawbacks (explained in this article) to entirely replacing your LMS with an LXP. When evaluating both systems, companies can experience an understandable anxiety if they must choose one or the other. The good news is they don’t have to. An LMS and an LXP can coexist, and organizations can reap the benefits of both systems. They must however have a comprehensive strategy to use an LMS and LXP in tandem.
Here are 5 ways a company can ensure that an LXP can coexist with their LMS:
1. Select an integrated platform that blends the two together.
One of the key challenges that organizations encounter when attempting to implement a dual-system solution is the struggle of running both an LMS and LXP simultaneously. Having two separate systems that your learners need to access might prove to be cumbersome for many learners, and one system could be favored over the other with the LXP likely to be suffering more neglect because it might be miscategorized as “optional training.”
While there are LMS platforms that are currently striving to bolster their LXP and user-centered functionality, the ideal solution would be for corporations to adopt a learning platform with both an LXP and LMS worked into the design. This would allow a learner to seamlessly integrate mandatory company trainings and individually tailored curricula. A learner could take a compliance course, and with the click of a button, access the LXP portal to explore on-demand training resources.
2. Leverage data gained from LXP use to develop future courses.
With an integrated system, your LXPs and LMSs can not only coexist but can enrich each other. Companies can use the data pulled from the LXP side to discover their employee learning trends. L&D departments will be able to analyze how well learners are understanding training content, but also what skills they are voluntarily learning, the types of content they are consuming, and what still needs to be reinforced. Taking a deep look at LXP data can give training departments a holistic view of what their workers want to learn, and how they like to learn it. New courses and training can be developed by Instructional Designers and SMEs that keep these considerations in mind. From these new, informed trainings, new LXP pathways can form for the users and the cycle will refresh itself in what is effectively now a symbiotic relationship.
3. Have the LMS side of the platform focus on Compliance.
While LXPs promise adaptable and user responsive learning, they don’t guarantee that a company will be able to push out trainings that check crucial boxes for legal standards or professional accreditation. Companies also need to keep in mind that LXPs create learning paths from a variety of sources based on the user data and individual curation, but don’t factor in bespoke trainings designed to address needs specific to the organization. For these kinds of trainings, employees need to follow a set curriculum that has been established by training departments to ensure certain learning needs are met.
For broad trainings like compliance and continuing certification, LMS is still the way to go. Having a side of your learning platform that specifically handles the more traditional aspects of training and development would ensure that necessary, large-scale trainings developed by L&D departments are still used, and learner data is tracked to inform future trainings.
4. Have the LXP side of the platform focus on upskilling and continuing career development.
With its flexibility and emphasis on an individual’s learning journey and self-determination, an LXP is ideal for fostering professional growth. Since LXPs are designed to pool content from a variety of different sources based on user metrics rather than hosting courses developed by an authoring tool like in an LMS, the learner will have access to material that is tailored exclusively to their needs. An employee’s key areas for improvement can be isolated and strengthened by a rich and diverse educational catalog. Employees can work to hone their job skills not covered in the standard company trainings administered on an LMS.
An LXP’s ability to identify where the individual employee needs to grow can be also used in the onboarding process, where employees who are starting out are surely going to be at different levels in terms of their experience. Instead of the typical ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to onboarding, an LXP can streamline and bring a varied group of employees up to speed at different paces.
Resources and content curated and shared by its users can be used to create a robust learning community. In the same way that employees in a company benefit from informal lessons taught by their colleagues or senior mentor figures, shared LXP pages can offer a strong system of ‘just-in-time’ trainings, instructional videos, explanatory blog posts and essays, and anything else that might serve a training purpose. The LXP side of a platform can go far beyond the singular nature of a learner interacting with an LMS and instead create a vibrant village focused on learning.
5. Gamify both sides of the platform to foster learner engagement.
A potential drawback of unifying an LMS and LXP is that learners will automatically separate the types of trainings in their heads. An employee will feel the need to get the potentially stilted traditional trainings out of the way to move onto the more appealing LXP oriented material. Keep in mind, if these two platforms are going to work together, they must be fully integrated rather than grafted onto each other. The best way to do that is to create a learning platform interface that gamifies both and treats each as a priority. By implementing user dashboard progress trackers for courses, unlockable badges and certificates, and leader boards that award a learner if they complete trainings or reach certain milestones, both the LMS- and LXP-based material are held up as equally valuable and crucial for development.
Conclusion
LXPs are going to play a major role in the future of trainings, as the benefits they offer are undeniable. It is a fallacy however to think that an LXP and an LMS are mutually exclusive. Companies and training organizations can experience the best of both worlds, and not have to sacrifice anything should they blend these two together. If a company takes the above considerations into account, they can enjoy the true potential of democratized, intuitive learning without missing out on the essential trainings facilitated by an LMS.