How to Choose the Right eLearning Platform

Selecting the right eLearning platform is crucial for companies aiming to provide comprehensive and effective education to their customers.

These platforms, with their interactive modules and a variety of learning materials, enable organizations to meet the diverse educational needs of their customer base, ensuring an engaging and enriching learning experience.

However, customer education managers often encounter challenges such as maintaining active engagement with learning content, assessing the impact of their educational efforts, and aligning the learning platform with the workflows of their customers.

This stems from the uncertainty surrounding the choice of the most suitable eLearning platform for their specific needs.

In this article, we’ll guide you through identifying your organization’s learning goals and highlight important considerations to keep in mind while choosing an eLearning platform.

What are eLearning platforms?

Online learning, or eLearning platforms, are digital products that provide online education content and tools to facilitate learning. Chances are, you’ve come across some well-known eLearning platforms like Coursera, Thinkific, Udemy, Moodle, and Edx, some of which are open-source.

Such platforms provide functionality like content authoring, quizzes, email notifications, SCORM compliance, course template library, gamification, reporting, interactive multimedia support, discussion forums, live webinars, and additional plugins.

A diverse range of individuals use the eLearning platform for different purposes. For example, professionals use such platforms to pursue professional development or corporate training, students use them for higher education purposes or tutorials, or organizations use eLearning platforms to conduct employee training or build into their own learning programs.

No matter the specific use case, eLearning platforms cater to varied learning styles, which fosters self-paced and high-quality learning experiences.

See this case study to discover how OSIsoft boosted self-paced online course registrations by a whopping 1000% using Skilljar.

Assessing your organization’s learning goals

The role of evaluating your broader learning goals depends on an organization’s structure. In some companies, Chief Learning Officers (CLO) and directors of learning and development take on this responsibility. In contrast, others may fall to customer education program managers, customer success professionals, or change management specialists.

No matter how your company is set up, here are the steps to figure out if your learning goals are on point:

• Define learning objectives: Start with thinking about why you want to educate your customers. Are you aiming for widespread adoption of your product or lower support costs? Outline these goals first to align your learning initiatives with your product strategy.

• Conduct needs analysis: Take a look at your team’s current skills. Are they equipped to drive product adoption? Identify any gaps in their skills that might be hindering successful engagement with your product among customers. One way to do this is through surveys and feedback mechanisms.

• Collect stakeholder input: Talk to your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support teams. They’re on the front lines and can provide valuable insights from customers. Maybe your support team has noticed common user pain points that targeted training could address.

• Define performance metrics: Define key metrics that matter for your SaaS product, like daily active users (DAU) or monthly active users (MAU), user retention rate, or feature usage rate. That way, you can see how well-trained customers can positively impact these metrics over time.

• Future skill requirements: Consider your product roadmap. If new features or updates are on the horizon, make sure your team understands them well enough to communicate their value to end users.

• Employee engagement: Ask your team how confident they feel in walking the users through product functionalities. Are they enthusiastic, or are they confused at some point? Their engagement level can directly impact how customers perceive and adopt the product.

Related content: 5 Signs Your Current LMS is Letting Down Your Customers and Partners

Key considerations when choosing an eLearning platform

Different eLearning platforms have different feature sets.

However, there are some features that you should consider as must-haves for an effective eLearning experience. Below are the five key considerations.

1. Accessibility

Skilljar is committed to aligning with the accessibility standards outlined in Level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2. These guidelines articulate the best practices for enhancing web content accessibility for individuals with disabilities. So, adherence to these standards contributes to a more user-friendly online experience for a diverse audience.

In developing new features, Skilljar prioritizes integrating these accessibility standards to ensure alignment with and fulfillment of the specified guidelines. This dedication to accessibility not only enhances Skilljar’s platform for a broader audience but also underscores its commitment to equitable educational opportunities.

2. Security

eLearning platforms must prioritize security due to the sensitive nature of user data and the potential consequences of breaches. Robust security measures help organizations safeguard personal information like user profiles, progress records, and payment details. A data security breach compromises user privacy and can lead to identity theft or financial fraud.

Our platform, Skilljar, comes with enterprise-grade security. Skilljar has undergone a Service Organization Controls 2 Type II (SOC 2 Type II) audit conducted by an independent third party certified by The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA).

Plus, we’ve earned the Trusted Cloud Provider certification from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). It’s a leading organization dedicated to promoting best practices for a secure cloud computing environment. This means you can trust that your data is in safe hands when you use Skilljar. Learn more about Skilljar security practices here.

3. Integration capabilities

The integration capabilities of an eLearning platform play a pivotal role in shaping a cohesive learning environment.

For example, platforms that integrate with payment gateways let you collect payments for your courses or subscriptions through your preferred payment gateway. In addition, connecting with LinkedIn allows learners to acknowledge their achievements and professional certifications and celebrate their wins.

Skilljar’s robust integrations bring a lot of possibilities to your eLearning journey. It integrates with Salesforce, Content Management Systems (CMS), marketing automation tools, payment gateways, security platforms, and business intelligence tools. View the full list of Skilljar’s integrations.

4. Support and help center

Help center files serve as an in-depth knowledge base, offering training managers quick solutions to common issues, troubleshooting guidance, and step-by-step instructions to incorporate into training content. Plus, a well-maintained help center contributes to a smoother user experience, which helps users accelerate their learning curve by self-serving the needed content.

Skilljar’s help center is an informative resource that allows learners to familiarize themselves quickly with our software’s functionalities. This accessibility to information minimizes onboarding hurdles and promotes a more seamless transition for new and existing Skilljar customers.

5. Time to value considerations

Time to value refers to how quickly users can start to access your product after they first sign on with your company. Customer onboarding typically helps accelerate TTV and onboarding programs that are delivered through an eLearning platform tend to expedite a user’s learning curve even further.

Check out this case study to find out how Automox reduced customer onboarding time by 75% using Skilljar.

Skilljar is the superior choice for customer eLearning

Customer education program managers face challenges like catering to diverse learning styles, personalizing content for various skill sets, and sustaining user engagement throughout the learning journey. Skilljar is a customer education software that addresses all those challenges. It supports diverse learning styles through multiple content types, easy integration with third-party tools, and customizable user experiences.

Sign up for the Skilljar demo and see how it streamlines learning experiences, accelerates product adoption, and ensures sustained customer success.