7 Reasons to Integrate Your Learning Management System and Virtual Classroom 

Are you in charge of managing your company’s training? Or do you generally need to conduct a ton of virtual classes for your business?

You’ve probably seen how important having a learning management system is in managing the process and improving your classes. However, there are still a ton of benefits to unlock – especially when you integrate it with other tools. 

If you use an LMS, they not only help you track the impact of your lessons, but they offer actionable feedback for improvement. 

In this article, we’ll be looking at what a learning management system is and why you should integrate one with your virtual classroom for better results. 

What’s a Learning Management System?

A learning management system also known as an LMS is an online software that’s dedicated to simplifying your training processes. It ensures that you can easily create, edit, manage, sort, and even publish learning materials for your class participants.

Every LMS has an administrative section where you can curate the syllabus and measure how effective your classroom experience is. Here, you can also customize learning plans and host as many materials you think will be useful. The user section is where your students or participants can interact. Here they can access a hub of resources and training materials from their device. 

As a business, you can choose to host your LMS on your local server. Here, your company is responsible for the storage, privacy, and updates which can be expensive to maintain. The plus side is that you can customize it as much as you’d like. 

If you don’t have enough resources for this, you can opt for a cloud-based LMS. Many educational software services offer this option. Here, you can host your LMS on an internet server and you don’t have to deal with bugs, data, or maintenance. It’s also a cheaper method if you’re looking to explore an LMS for your organization. 

Benefits of Integrating Your LMS with a Virtual Classroom

There are many reasons why you should consider integrating a learning management system with a virtual classroom. Asides from being a convenient option, it’s also important for your business growth, and here’s why;

1. Centralize your learning materials

If you already use a virtual classroom for your training, you’d need somewhere to store all of your teaching notes and learning materials. Having a centralized location where you can easily retrieve a presentation helps make your teaching process a lot smoother. 

You can easily share a resource with your students on the spot when they request it. Do this by sharing a link or sending them an invitation to their email address. 

Asides from your offering easily accessible resources, this integration also provides a better workflow for your trainers. 

During a class, they can easily make any changes to the learning materials so they don’t forget afterward. This ensures that your lectures are always up-to-date. Your participants or students can also see the changes you’ve made so they take it into account. 

Also, since there’s a central hub for presentation slides, videos, papers and so much more, your trainers can easily consult any of these archives for better explanations in a class. 

Perhaps what we love the most is that you can record the events of your virtual classroom and add them to your LMS archives. This way, other instructors or students, can access the class recording when they need to teach or learn that same syllabus. 

2. Track progress in real-time

Rather than sharing your resources with students and then tracking how well they performed after a take-home assignment, you can track this in real-time. 

With your learning management system, you can take notes and add observations you’ve noticed during your class. 

For example, if you’re hosting a class on Google Classroom, you can immediately log your class attendance with the names of the people in your room. 

Over time, during pop quizzes, you can send scores to your LMS to see student participation and how well they are performing. Your virtual classroom also allows you to see how your students react to certain scenarios and sections. 

You can tell which student understands your class, which one seems distracted, which one is more engaged, and the one feels lost.  

This also applies to your trainers. You need to know whether or not you’ve improved as a trainer. 

If you have new teachers, this is an excellent way to see how well they teach over time. Have someone join their classes to compare their learning materials with what is being taught. You’d be able to deduce how well they’ve improved. Make notes for actionable feedback. Later on, you can review the reports on your LMS and keep track of their progress. 

3. More engaging classes

With this integration, you can offer a more interactive session through a classroom experience irrespective of where they are. You can start by creating activities that require face-to-face activities. These hands-on activities will help you improve your classroom reach and have more student participation. 

Since you’ll be integrating with a virtual classroom, you can break them into groups. In these breakout rooms, ask them to collaborate on projects, have private discussions, or even share content. 

There’s also a real-time class chat so they can ask their questions and have them answered immediately. You can also conduct polls for pop quizzes and ask them to leave comments in the class chat. 

Multimedia use also offers a very effective learning experience because they use all of their senses to stay alert. There’s also a bit of competition to keep things entertaining. So rather than watching tons of videos or reading endless notes, your students can enjoy the learning process. 

It also fosters a little community of other learners like themselves and over time, they can forge friendships or build a network from your learning system.

4. Helps reduce the overall cost

If your learning management system is still focused on a physical model, you’d know how expensive it can get. From the cost of paying for conference rooms to printing out materials and other logistics. 

However, when you integrate this with a virtual classroom, you cut business costs spent on this. For one, students can learn online without leaving the comfort of their homes. Instructors also don’t have to travel down every time there’s a class. 

Since there are no physical limitations, it means that you can scale. There are also no boundaries for distance learning. Get students, employees, or clients from anywhere in the world and adjust the timing to fit into their timezone. 

You can implement this at a worldwide level without the financial impact of constant retraining. Do this by creating reusable content from your classes. 

For example, if you’re holding a virtual training session for new employees, over time, you don’t have to recreate the same session for every new employee. Instead, when you record a class, upload it online and share that link. 

The same approach can be applied to webinars and other events. You can simply upload that content to your Youtube channel or even resell it as an online course. This helps you cut recurring costs. 

5. Save time 

When collating your syllabus and conducting lessons, integrating your LMS with a virtual classroom helps you manage time more effectively. A great way this can happen is by scheduling classes online for a specific time frame. 

Rather than struggling to find a time that works for you and your participants – especially when you have a very diverse class in different timezones. You can automate class reminders so you don’t have to spend time emailing your participants with the joining information.

As an instructor, you can control your schedule better. For example, you can record lessons in advance when you won’t be able to make it to class. There’s also the perk of not having to physically travel down to a classroom to teach. 

With an LMS integration, you also have multiple options for publishing your training resources. There’s usually an inbuilt editor for creating custom texts, presentations, exams and so much more. It also helps to simplify the process of creating these materials so you can spend less time working on them. 

6. Get clear and actionable feedback

Would you like to know what areas of your courses are difficult to understand? What to modify and how easy it is to complete a course? Then integrating your virtual classroom with your LMS helps with this. 

While in the classroom you can identify boring areas and make things more interesting, an LMS gives you insights into the overall experience. 

This can also be applied to your assessments. For example, you can import exams into your LMS and have a brief one in class frequently. Set it up in a way that this assessment is auto-graded. The results you get can give insights into whether or not you need to revisit your learning paths. It’ll show whether you need to split your classroom or create new learning guides for specific students.

You can also send out anonymous surveys and collate the responses on your LMS. With it, you can track frequent responses and patterns in your classroom experience. Get feedback after every session and course from your participants and instructors too. Both evaluations will offer actionable feedback you can use to improve the training. 

7. Flexible learning for all

Whether you’re an instructor or participant, you’d have a flexible experience with these LMS integrations. You can enjoy flexibility in the learning schedule. As an instructor, you can simply record a class ahead of time. It also takes less time to work on when compared to physical classes.

For participants, you can afford to not attend a class at that fixed time. This means you can simply visit the recording and browse through the resources to stay up to date. The training resources are available online so students can access them at any time. You can do this by providing links gotten from your LMS.

There’s also flexibility in the learning modes. While some students prefer to learn through multimedia and visual content, there are still some that prefer reading. So giving them both options allows them to choose what works for them. They can join in with any device – mobile phones inclusive. 

Conclusion

Integrating your virtual classroom with an LMS increases your reach by offering a convenient, flexible, and easily accessible classroom experience. Your participants can learn at a flexible pace and they can choose to learn independently if they’d prefer. You’d also save time and resources in learning and development. 

Update courses so they are more engaging, reuse them for other events, and measure how effective they are over time. Since you now know how important integrating an LMS into your virtual classroom is, it’s time to start putting this to practice. Do all of this and more with a single integration. Start by choosing the best learning management system for your business here.