How to Choose an LMS: A 4-Step Guide and tips

Step 1 – Set your goals and objectives

Have a brainstorm with your staff and discuss all the problems in the educational process you currently face, and why choosing an LMS should help you solve them. For example, the lack of a centralized course progress dashboard makes tracking topic progress across several groups of students difficult.

Be prepared that you will come up with quite an impressive list of challenges and that none of the LMS software selection at your disposal will cover all of them. We will discuss the ways to overcome this below.

Step 2 – Define LMS platform features

Analyze the list of challenges you came up with and define the LMS features required to solve them. Once again, be prepared that you might face challenges not covered by any LMS vendor selection. Covering 80% of your requests should be a sufficient degree for starters. Following this logic, you should later be able to shortlist and choose an LMS that will provide the most advantages for students and teachers.

Step 3 – Explore the market and compare the pricing

Now that you know the challenges you face and understand the LMS features that can help solve those challenges, explore the market and look for software that offers the most complete match of features for your needs. Most importantly, it’s time to think of pricing, as it might be better to get by without some shiny stuff if it saves you 50% of costs.

How to choose an LMS correctly then? Start with the core features at the minimum price and compare how adding more features affects pricing. You will quickly learn that many LMS vendors market costly coatings as absolute must-haves. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to finally shortlist several LMS systems that match your needs best.

Step 4 – Choose your LMS platform type and vendor

How to choose the right LMS for your educational institution? Pricing should be the key concern. If the cloud-based LMS vendor charges per user and you have about 1,000 students — wouldn’t the annual price be comparable to buying an off-the-shelve LMS platform and not paying huge monthly subscription fees?

However, running an on-prem LMS will incur additional infrastructure maintenance expenses. Even more importantly, on-prem LMS platforms are rarely capable of seamless API integration with a wide range of third-party software your educational institution might already be using.

Thus, when choosing an LMS consider the ease of integration with your current toolkit, the long-term CAPEX and OPEX, and the degree of meeting your expectations. We’ve mentioned various LMS software types several times already, so it’s time to take a closer look at them.

Most popular LMS for elementary and K12 schools

While there definitely is a wide market for such software, several vendors stand out as the most widespread LMS platforms that meet the most needs of elementary and K-12 schools:

• Google Classroom,
• Schoology,
• Edmodo,
• Quizlet,
• Moodle (as an alternative to Schoology or Edmodo)
• Kahoot!

Depicting each of them in detail is outside the scope of this article, but you will definitely be able to google them up, read reviews, compare their feature lists and pricing models and see what fits your demands best.

Most popular LMS for universities

There is no need to explain how much the educational process in universities and colleges differs from one in K-12 schools. Differences in curriculum, new types of tasks, possibilities for edutainment, ML and Big Data usage, the need to integrate with a much wider range of tools, and many more specifics and requirements make university LMS systems stand out from the crowd:

• Blackboard Learn,
• D2L Brightspace,
• Moodle,
• Instructure Canvas,
• Open edX

Once again, depicting the pros and cons of each of them is not needed here, you can look them up and see if any o these LMS solutions meets your needs.

Key features of an LMS for schools

LMS platforms for schools should enable collaboration between school staff, pupils, their parents, and should provide a possibility of access for guests (external auditors, etc.). Therefore, content creation and import/export capabilities, course progress tracking, parental involvement, quizzes and surveys are the cornerstones of LMS usability for schools.

Key features of an LMS for universities

On the other hand, not all university students have the same background. Some of them might have prior experience with the topic, which means they should not waste time waiting while the rest of the group catches up. Therefore, personalized learning paths with ML and AI, Big Data analysis to assess the course performance, SCORM, xAPI, LTI compliance to ensure course content interoperability and accessibility from other platforms make important LMS features for universities.

Read also: Benefits of Multi-Tenant LMS

How much does an LMS cost?

When you create the LMS cost comparison table of the systems you shortlisted, add 10-15% on implementation expenses. This can be up to $7,000 for cloud-based LMS solutions and up to $25,000 for on-premise LMS platforms.

Also, keep in mind that your staff and learners will expect cross-platform functionality from your future LMS to enable them to access the software from desktop and mobile devices. Yes, learning management systems that don’t offer mobile apps or a mobile-friendly experience cost less. But they might ultimately fail as a cohesive and all-encompassing LMS for K 12 schools, colleges and higher education.

Thus said, when you choose the right LMS final price comparison values will greatly depend on several factors:

• the pricing model chosen,
• the list of features available,
• the list of features your organization will actually end up using,
• the degree to which these features will meet your needs
• the costs of customizing and implementing the system to be a fit for your educational organization.

Sadly, no definitive LMS pricing comparison can be proposed with such a variety of factors implementing the final estimates. You will have to calculate the LMS price for your organization yourself or you can ask us for help.

While doing this by yourself, you might conclude that investing in a purpose-built product specifically developed to meet your needs can be much more cost-efficient than trying to adopt an overly-complicated system where you will barely use most of the functions.

When to choose custom LMS development?

Custom LMS development advantages and disadvantages

While Academy Smart might seem biased on this point, we actually speak based on our rich LMS development expertise, portfolio of successful products built for organizations of varying scope, and deep understanding of eLearning industry specifics.

Thus said — in the majority of cases, custom LMS development turns out to be much more cost- and effort-effective, as compared to buying an off-the-shelf platform and trying to adjust it to your needs (or rather, to adjust your educational process to the platform). We will list the benefits of custom LMS development in the next section, but the key advantages are as follows:

• full control over the functionality of the product you will use
• active involvement in the development process
• rapid integration of your feedback and testing of your ideas on live prototypes
• you can have as many users, user roles and active users in your own product, as needed
• LMS costs on usage don’t depend on the amount of time your users spend in the system

However, it’s important to keep 2 aspects in mind when choosing an LMS:

• if you go for cloud-based custom LMS development, you will have to pay for the traffic between your users and your system, which will significantly add to general OPEX
• with the cloud-based LMS deployment hosted by vendor, the most common approach is a multi-tenant database, which lowers maintenance expenses but brings certain cybersecurity concerns. These concerns can be addressed

As you can see, with certain preparation and understanding, you can mitigate the risks and reap the benefits of custom LMS development. Let’s talk about these in more details now.