Learning management system – Buy or Build?

If you were put in charge of acquiring a Learning Management System for your organization, then what would you think is better – buy and LMS or build it in-house as per your organization’s requirements? There are a few issues involved as to whether you should buy outright or use in-house resources to build it since e-learning software must provide you great flexibility, performance as well as connectivity to be efficient and at the same time effective.

In-house developed software can be very attractive as it is custom-made to meet your organization’s specific requirements. But is it saving time, money and effort for you? Or is it costing you all of these? To reduce the cost to a minimal, you would be required to identify the minutest details that would be desirable as well as pin down which person in the organization would get access to which resource. You have to make sure you provide an outline of the data and reporting needs during the development prices as you will need to verify these at the time of evaluation and implementation. Also keep data quality of the Learning Management System in mind. If your e-learning will include courses, then your LMS must be able to track the data you require in the style that you desire.

If you decide to purchase a Learning management system, make sure that the features available whether custom-built or not are already available when you start your evaluation. Do not take it for granted that the LMS will have all the features built in as per your requirements. Do not assume anything; you have to check each and everything yourself to makes sure what you want is available.

Before you decide to build or purchase a Learning management system for e-learning, make are clear about the following:
* The kind of user interface you are looking for in an LMS
* The level of debugging that will be employed if you decide to build the system.
* The access levels available to various users.
* How you will go about testing the usability of the system.
* The kind of output formats you will use.

All these will vary from one organization to another so there should be a team that sits together to come up with a plan. Testing has to be carried out all through the process and you can begin with one department perhaps before it is implemented in the whole organization. In some cases it might turn out that the in-house developed LMS might work out to be more expensive to build or even maintain. It can happen that the people who developed the Learning management system may not be with the organization any more thus disrupting the technical support. Hence many companies might prefer to buy a product off the shelf which gives you standard options, training, support and continual upgrades.

Article Source: http://www.new.citynewslive.com

If you are looking to add value to the learning or teaching process then the Learning management system is for you. Check out the various LMS available here!

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