Academic and Corporate LMS Understanding The Differences

Academic and Corporate LMS: Understanding The Differences

Online training is becoming very popular in corporate sectors and academic organizations. Both the institutes can benefit from a reliable LMS and today many companies are making use of different systems to facilitate their learning procedures and also to look for fresh talents among the employees.

On the other hand, schools and universities also use LMS to provide a higher level of education across various geographical locations and even to people who reside on the other side of the globe.

There are different types of systems that are used by the organizations like free or paid system, blended classrooms, cloud, flipped classrooms, BYOD and etc. This is more than enough to make your head spin, but before we look into so many choices, it is important to understand the difference between academic LMS or corporate LMS. Here in this article, let’s discuss this in details.

Picking up the right LMS development platform for your training is important or your employees, trainers and teachers will be frustrated and you will be burning money trying to fix the issues, which could have been easily avoided by picking the right LMS for the first time.

There are lots of differences between the corporate learning needs and academic learning needs.

Theoretical and Practical Knowledge:

In the educational system, the prime focus isn’t to produce well-rounded students having deep knowledge and understanding of a particular subject. They are encouraged to explore their field and theoretical knowledge is an end goal in itself.

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In corporate training, the learning is all about practical implementation of something. It is much closer to what is known as vocational training, but is concerned with more specificity for specific roles or jobs.


Different course timelines:

Semesters, quarters and trimesters, these are the type of time frames that are popular in the academic institutions. For them, the LMS must work with commonly used academic scheduling units that includes holidays, exam times, periods. Corporate trainings work on time frames that are typically shorter than that of the academia. Seasonal hiring sprees, business needs, changing market demands, all have a great impact on the corporate training course. The LMS should offer great flexibility in the scope and duration of the training course.


The frequency of updates:

The main purpose of corporate training is to teach the employees specific business skills that are tied to the organization.  Since the training courses need to meet the ever changing business demands, the materials need to be updated much more often than academic courses. On the other hand, educational courses are based on science and humanities and often need less updates.


Integrations:

Corporate trainings and work often involve a lot of moving data from one system to another. Your preferred LMS should be able to offer integration with all the common enterprise data formats and have good importing and exporting capabilities to make the process easier and faster.

The integrations may include content formats like documents, videos, images and also eLearning specific formats and internal LMS data formats. Support for such type of formats is less crucial in the academic works with some exceptions of Microsoft office, Adobe PDF or Google Drive formats that are usually standard integrations for most software.


Social platform Vs intranet portal:

Academic e-learning management system always tend to have an extended social and peer to peer capabilities as they focus on encouraging learners to collaborate and also discuss the subject that they have studied.

Corporate LMS platforms are more like learning portal that is meant to offer assistance to the employees with workplace related updates, content and quick access to different types of reference materials.


Organizational structure:

Educational institutions often have a classic structure of courses, departments, lessons and enterprises and have different organizational structures that are reflected in the training programs. But the terms like teachers, students and professors will appear to be a bit childish to a corporate user. Here the code designers and instructors simply leave the lesson material and are usually reachable over email or internal messaging if there is any issue.


Grades Vs certificates:

Corporate training often offers the ability of tracking and completing in the form of certifications. A gradebook type of measuring the completion would make them feel demeaning. On the other hand, academic learning is carried out by tracking the user’s progress through the grading system. It offers support for prerequisites and other enrollment options that are tied to a specific age or academic years that are completed.

“Understanding the difference between corporate and academic use of LMS would help you to choose the platform that works best for you and also your learners.”

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