Trying before buying anything is a must so that you know that whatever you are investing into is worth your money and energy. Thus, free trials are a huge part of buying a learning management system for your company. What makes it even more important is the fact that the LMS that you are buying is going to be in use frequently which is why it should be tried and tested thoroughly before the purchase.
Most vendors offer a generous free trial; especially when their LMS is as good as they claim it to be. However, a lot of vendors are also pretty strict about their trial time frame. The shortest trials span roughly across two weeks; thus it is important to strategize your trial so that you can make the most out of it.
Here are some tips to properly test and try your LMS so that your business can benefit the most out of it.
Schedule Smartly
After a demo, usually most businesses shortlist 3-4 LMS for trial and the trick is to be smart with the trial scheduling process. While some vendors are pretty liberal when it comes to the trial period time span, some vendors can also be very strict with the time frame. Thus it is important to have your trial schedules planned.
Take up trials of learning management systems that have some kind of cross-over or similar features so that you can have the scope to compare them with each other. The smartest businesses are those that schedule the trials in the right sequence but avoid making it too long by toying around with the systems.
Trial team assembling
For a successful trial, you need to treat it like a pilot of the LMS that you will eventually select. For such a fix, you need to assemble an efficient trial team that will try and test the LMS in every specific way possible. The trial team that should ideally include people with assigned roles of managers, administrators and learners will fully test the learning management system.
After selecting a team, it is important that you brief every team member about the process, your expectations and ultimately, the information that you need for them to select the right LMS at the end. After that, add the team to your system. After the trial, your team should be able to judge the LMS with respect to your requirements and you should be able to map out the pros and cons of every LMS that has been tried by your team.
LMS trial toolkit
Getting an LMS free trial doesn’t simply mean logging into a new system and just pressing buttons to get some kind of absolute value. To really get the actual value, you need to simulate the actual learning environment and test it in every possible way.
Now if you are taking a trial of a learning management system and are sure about purchasing it, there can be two possible scenarios; either your company is just making the shift to LMS and it is your first ever LMS purchase or you already have an LMS and you are replacing it with a new system because of so-and-so reason.
In the first case, a trial that replicates your current methods of training does not make much sense. Thus you need to design a workflow first according to the way you want your system to work and then test your potential LMS through it with assigned dummy users.
If you stand in the second case and your company already uses a learning management system, your trial will probably be more realistic as you might already have training programs that can mimic actual learning environments. However it is advisable to not make it the exact same as your current program and rather try to test things that you want in your new LMS.
Vendor support
Many prospective customers are reluctant to talk to Vendors because of various reasons like fear of a sales pitch or even just general annoyance towards talking to the vendor. However, by not talking to the vendors, you are doing nobody’s profit. Talking to the vendor can help you understand your LMS better as you get chances to ask questions.
The specific material that you should ask your vendor includes, customer stories similar to your case, testimonials, reviews, customer references, API and technical documents and product roadmap.
Conclusion:
LMS trials are a very important pre-implementation process and it helps you understand your LMS better while letting you know if the thing you are spending your resources on is worth the money. A good LMS will have all the options for a transparent trial while a great and genuine vendor will facilitate your trial.
When it comes to good LMSs, Mindflash gives all the important trial and test options and excellent vendor support to determine the Mindflash pricing rightly and to understand if it fulfills all the requirements of your organization.
