| | SEPTEMBER 20169CIOReviewteaching and tutoring staff, they will stay with you.There are many LMS's on the market and many different ways to get started. The easiest way (though the most expensive) is to use outsourced providers like Lynda.com, which was purchased by LinkedIn, or others such Udemy and Udacity. For general and basic subjects, there is Kahn Academy, and if you are looking for more college types of courses, you can try Coursera. However, the more common approach for a company is to leverage a free or low cost solution and build your own with either internal or external resources. As an example, there are LMS tailored to certain vertical markets like grade schools, colleges, or even manufacturing. Some of these companies have been around for a decade or more, and some are relatively new. Examples of general LMS companies include: Absorb, Blackboard, Grovo, Knewton, Moodle, NIIT, Paradiso, Schoology, TataInteractive, Thors, Upsidelearning, and ZeusLearning.Of these companies, the largest installed user base is Moodle with about 89 Million users. It also has over 10 million created courses and over 1000 plug-ins and is available in over 100 languages in 232 countries. The software is open-source and is used all over the world by large and small organizations alike.Moodle is like a vast set of Lego blocks or an ecosystem of modules that you can use to build almost any kind of simple or complex learning environment. The toolset and plug-in inventory is so robust that you can build pretty much whatever kind of learning system you can imagine. You can also contract with 60 worldwide partners to help you create your own unique LMS.In the days of old, we all expected employees to learn on their own when a new skillset or technology became necessary, or we would hire new employees with that knowledge. In today's ultra-competitive market for talent, time to market, and technology innovation, those strategies no longer suffice. Today, we need to increase our staff's abilities and our knowledge capital across the whole organization to survive and thrive. Don't let talented employees go, when you can mold them into something better. So if an LMS isn't among your various project priorities, it's time to add it to the list! A LMS allows an organization of any size to inculcate learning, track progress, track course completion and standardize merit based recognition
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