Four strategies to supercharge your continuing education program with the right LMS

Introduction

According to the latest Community Brands research, 51% of association members rank continuing education as the most important membership benefit. With the right best practices and a little time, your organization can ensure your continuing education program is a valuable member benefit and a driver of non-dues revenue.

Keep learners invested in your learning program. Read our blog for tips to discover the best learning management system (LMS) for your continuing education program and best practices to effectively create programming.

How to choose the right learning management system (LMS) to support your continuing education program

According to the latest Community Brands research, organizations must innovate to maintain their competitive edge with professional education. To remain relevant, organizations should provide new learning opportunities.

To streamline continuing education course management and support the entire learner experience, your organization can consider leveraging a learning management system. When researching for the best learning management system (LMS) here are the top four factors to consider:

1. Offer live and on-demand in one learning platform
The latest Community Brands research found learners want to consume content in a variety of formats, particularly in short videos, online courses, webinars, and hands-on experiential training. You need an LMS that can support your learners’ needs by offering both in-person and virtual learning formats.

Providing live and on-demand learning options in one LMS will ensure your continuing education program appeals to more learners, boosting your accessibility, and helping you reach a larger audience. With an LMS that supports both virtual and in-person content, you’ll deliver a seamless learner experience, remove staff process inefficiencies, and save costs by consolidating systems.

2. Leverage automatic processes
With the right LMS, you can ensure your data integrates seamlessly to your association management system (AMS). With data integration, your content can automatically synchronize between your LMS and AMS, delivering the latest courses and content. Staff can also leverage the automatic credit submission feature to ensure both learners and staff always know how many credits a learner has completed. Finally, search for an LMS that offers an auto-archive feature, that quickly converts live webinars into on-demand content.

While Zoom is a great platform for webinars, it doesn’t offer functionality like course synchronization, automatic credit submission, and auto-archiving for webinars. You need a robust LMS to meet the needs of varied learner preferences and keep your continuing education content fresh.

3. Duplicate courses and reuse content
As you search for an LMS, look for one with the capability to duplicate different resources within the administrative side of your LMS. See if you can take one of your courses and duplicate it to create a working template. Having a course template will make it much easier to create new course content.

Additionally, you’ll want to look for an LMS that offers the functionality of rebroadcasts. Rebroadcasts allow your staff to take a previously recorded event and reuse the content in a new way. You can incorporate Q&A checkpoints and credit functionality, but the content is pre-recorded, and you set the course to play at a certain day and time in your LMS. Using rebroadcasts helps you broaden your learner audience, meeting the needs of various time zones and also stretching your original programming.

4. Use support services
Finally, as you seek an LMS to enhance your continuing education program, you’ll want to consider how readily available technical support is for your staff and learners. While you can hope your staff and learners won’t need to use technical support, the reality is, they will likely need the help of your LMS software vendor.

While selecting your LMS vendor, it’s crucial to evaluate their support services and discuss their technical support policies. Can they readily answer questions from your learners throughout the day? Who can your staff contact in the case of an emergency? Getting these answers will help you choose the best LMS for your entire continuing education program.

Discover how Freestone LMS can enhance your continuing education program

Ready to take your continuing education program to the next level? It might be time to consider a robust learning management system (LMS) to empower your staff and learners. With Freestone LMS you can create, manage, and deliver a variety of continuing education course offerings, driving learner engagement and non-dues revenue.

Work smarter, not harder with Freestone when you use intuitive tools to duplicate courses, reuse content, and stretch your current programming.