Learning management systems (LMS or LM systems) are how forward-thinking businesses meet and exceed their educational needs. They streamline training and awareness programs for clientele and other stakeholders, optimizing sales, retention, customer support, and overall operations and analytics.
Demand for LMS systems grows rapidly, with the global LMS market expected to hit $63.12B by 2033. As organizations decide whether to build or buy their learning programs, it’s important to consider common objectives like customer success and the overall deployment process.
In this guide, we’ll explore every key aspect of learning management system development—from assessing your training needs to navigating the decision-making process and ensuring a smooth implementation. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap to choose, customize, or create an LMS that aligns with your goals and drives measurable results.
The Planning and Ideation Phase
At the earliest stages, you’ll need to determine the target audience for your learning platform. Whether for internal learners or a customer education platform, this will determine the right kinds of content to use, delivery methods, and overall goals.
Other advanced features to consider include course and user management, tracking, and how education content will integrate other tools—or be integrated into other platforms. The platform must have reporting capabilities if course content satisfies regulatory or similar official certification processes.
This is where you align your business model and goals with your learning system.
Budget considerations are also important here, as buying or building your own LMS platform has unique costs. A custom LMS provides the best of both worlds.
Design and Architecture Considerations
You’ll also want to consider your overall tech architecture when choosing between off-the-shelf solutions or building your own learning management system from scratch.
For example:
- Does your organization rely on desktop- or web-based platforms?
- How often will learners need mobile access?
- Will the platform need to support hybrid instruction—both online and in-person?
You should always prioritize user experience (UX) for learners. Make sure content is accessible across various platforms—desktops, tablets, phones—but focus on the ones they are most likely to use. For example, if a target demographic is most likely to view content on the go in a metropolitan area, making materials downloadable to view offline can let you capture their attention during an otherwise boring commute.
Hitting these baseline concerns early allows greater customization down the line, such as personalizing course content and delivery to users’ ideal learning processes.
Another consideration on this front is implementing a headless LMS solution. By decoupling frontend and backend development, these platforms allow endless customization for specific devices and use cases to future-proof your training. Headless LMS solutions like Thought Industries enable vendors to build the most foundational and backend needs while your team fully customizes the frontend interface learners engage with.
The LMS Development Process
If you decide to build some of all of your LMS, one excellent approach is agile methodology. This approach prioritizes iterative design and constant improvements to meet evolving customer expectations. As learners change over time, so should your LMS—and agile supports that.
Benefits of agile methodology in LMS development include but are not limited to:
- More adaptability and flexibility over time as new needs emerge
- Faster delivery/launch of your online learning management system
- Better customer satisfaction thanks to implementing user feedback
- Clearer communication and collaboration between development teams
By testing at various stages throughout the process, from prototype to alpha and beta, companies gain a much more granular sense of what is working and what isn’t. They can also use this data to prioritize remedies to specific issues and pain points before launch.
It’s also critical to engage all teams throughout the process. UX and UI professionals should be working in concert with lesson planners and creatives rather than in silos.
Implementing Key LMS Features
With a development approach in place, you’ll need to consider what core features to focus on (at least initially) for LMS deployment. The most fundamental ones involve management for learning content itself, like course and document hosting. Then, there are additional features like assessments and user activity monitoring.
You’ll also need to consider how the LMS integrates with systems like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Configuring automation across these platforms or even integrating AI will considerably reduce manual workloads and better ensure synchronized data.
Another key consideration is data privacy and security. LMS software development must comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations regarding data collection and processing practices.
Although the GDPR is a European law, companies worldwide must protect the rights of data subjects. If learning modules are accessible to EU residents, you’ll need to be transparent about how their data is collected, among other obligations.
Testing and Quality Assurance
Quality assurance (QA) is critical to all software development, and dynamic learning platforms are no different. You should test early and often, ideally involving human testers that resemble (or are) your target demographic as often as possible.
There are three main kinds of tests you should be running as you QA your LMS:
- Functionality: Are the features you need working as expected? Do learners have the ability to access content, and is their data recorded accurately?
- Security: Are users secure when using your LMS? Is their data protected in compliance with applicable regulations? Are you obtaining their consent?
- Performance: Does the LMS function efficiently? What are the resource costs of managing learning, and are there any opportunities to minimize them?
Beyond these, organizations should also create tests specific to their challenges. These may involve learners’ struggles with complex content, technological literacy, or inconsistency in delivery between different segments or trainers.
When comparing development approaches and pre-built solutions, prioritize vendors with robust LMS reporting and analytic tools before and after launch.
Deployment and Launch
When it’s time to deploy your LMS platform, you’ll need to find hosting and ensure user security. Pre-built systems may come bundled with a cloud hosting solution, but organizations building an LMS from scratch likely need to find their own.
Regardless of how and where the system is hosted, you’ll need to provide training for both learners (users) and your internal or extended personnel who manage it. This includes support for both fronts, available through the LMS, and channels such as a live chat for anyone with trouble accessing the LMS.
In addition, you’ll want to plan for ongoing maintenance to keep the LMS functional and scalable and stay ahead of changes in the tech environment. A rigorous update schedule minimizes repair and overall LMS development costs in the long term.
Solutions like Thought Industries are future-proofed to survive and thrive in customer education revolutions. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and more to detect and address trends in the data is your key to meeting learners where they are for years to come—and reaping the rewards.
Long-Term LMS Maintenance
Whether building or buying an LMS platform, you’ll need to nail all parts of the development lifecycle. That starts with scoping out the ideal LMS for your organization and its target audience, including the tech infrastructure it will exist within. Then, you need to pick a development process that makes sense for those needs—ideally, an agile methodology that can adapt to many situations.
Considering those fundamentals, you can optimize the features on offer, QA them before launch, and provide continuous support long-term to keep learners satisfied.
Thought Industries will help you deliver on all these fronts.
Check out the Thought Industries enterprise learning platform to see what a custom-built LMS can do for your organization. Or get in touch to learn more!
