Be prepared for future innovation by taking the necessary steps to ensure that your approach to Learning Management Systems all but guarantees interoperability.

Over the past 15 years, LMSs have become an integral part of most school’s operations, and it’s easy to understand why. Whether it’s to keep track of grades, deliver textbook material online, or facilitate collaboration between students in group projects and learning exercises, software increases the ease with which teachers teach and students learn.

Or at least, that’s how it’s intended to work. Districts are now finding that the LMS they adopted a decade ago is having trouble integrating with newer, cloud-based software. Or that teachers have to keep a long running list of different passwords because their district’s LMS doesn’t integrate with any of their other software. Or that textbook publishers require schools to adopt their very own LMSs to access exclusive content. Either way, what should be a streamlined system is being bogged down by non-interoperable software.

How do educators deal with the need to adopt new platforms? A revision of their approach to LMS installation and implementation is in order — it might take money, time, and training, but an IT infrastructure built for maximum compatibility has the added benefit of requiring far fewer overhauls in the future. A system pre-wired for interoperability will be much more adept at handling technological progressions, and integrate new software far more easily.

A House of Cards

Districts using multiple incompatible LMSs that aren’t already frustrated by inefficiencies almost certainly will be in the coming years, as pressure is put on them to adopt more and more advanced digital learning tools. What’s working adequately today may hold districts back in the future because they won’t be able to adapt to new technologies.

Before beginning the process of updating the system and integrating new LMSs, there are two things to keep in mind to manage exceptions:

First, that there is no “silver bullet” LMS solution for any district and its teachers. A school will always require more than one piece of software — and often, more than one LMS — to ensure interoperability throughout the district while meeting the specific needs of its various stakeholders. While switching over to a single platform might intuitively sound like the answer, it would restrict growth in its own way by limiting a district’s ability to adopt new software and technologies that may be released by a different vendor in the future.

Secondly, building upon a district’s current tech stack with an “add-on” may be the safest approach for the status quo, but it’s certainly not the smartest. The revamping process will undoubtedly entail working with the solutions the district already utilizes, but administrators must think bigger than an add-on learning module: they need to think overhaul.

With this in mind, it might be time to really think about planning for the future by changing a system that works today. Administrators must not build their school on a technological house of cards when there are adaptable, exciting, technologically innovative options ahead.

Moving Forward

Districts must consider adopting an integrated best-of-breed LMS solution, and the first step is to establish a vision. Administrative stakeholders should dream up goals that they would expect their ideal LMS solution to achieve. Should it be mobile-accessible, and if so, how can educators guarantee sufficient data security? Should the LMS come with analytics, a specific learning methodology, course registration components, or application sharing?

The answers to these questions will impact both students and educators, so it’s important to get them involved in the conversation as well. While in the planning stage, consider putting together a committee consisting of educators, students, parents, principals, and other stakeholders so they can be part of the planning process.

With this set of parameters in mind, an IT technician can whittle down hundreds of LMSs to come up with a set of 20 or so that both fit with the district’s vision and are compatible with whatever systems it has in place and would like to keep.

From the narrowed-down batch of LMSs, those leading the planning process can request information and demonstrations for each of them to find the best, most accessible jumping-off point. Educators must select the future-oriented LMS base their district can grow with.

Implementation and Training

After selecting the system, the next step is to begin an implementation process that follows a preset timeline. But where to begin? In a K-12 school district, the best place to try out a new LMS is with middle school students. Middle-schoolers are old enough to take advantage of the system’s range of features, including centralized learning, grade tracking, assessment analytics, and scheduling. Most importantly, by the time those 7th and 8th graders who vetted the system get to high school, it will be a seamless integration.

It’s not just a matter of training the kids, though. Most resistance to a new system will come during the training process, when educators need to learn entirely new methods of teaching, ones that may conflict with their ingrained habits. Teachers have to do their part in learning the system so they can encourage students to use it well. A comprehensive training program, therefore, is essential. Administrators must provide documents and cheat sheets for teachers to get them ready, as well as continued IT support to ensure the system continues to thrive.

Streamlining Future Integration

This overhaul should be more exhaustive and more carefully considered than what most districts went through when first installing an LMS many years ago. The focus of this should be on creating an adaptable solution. Districts should therefore be in conversation with IT professionals to create a foundation of software that can easily be built upon.

Since most districts will be dealing with multiple LMSs, a single sign on (SSO) approach is often optimal. Implementing SSOs on mixed platforms will make the entire LMS more seamless, preventing teachers from having to memorize dozens of passwords. In addition, student data should be stored separately from other important data sets, creating a layer of security to protect sensitive student information.

Finally, districts must consider the possibilities offered by third-party web applications. Cloud-based services rely on making integration portals accessible and easy to implement, so when updating their LMS systems, superintendents should think about what cloud-based apps can do to enhance the learning experience.

Imagine a future where LMSs are accessible on students’ mobile devices; where data is stored in different places, but can be accessed and interpreted by multiple LMSs; where web apps constantly and easily refine the LMS without the need for further overhauls. All of this can be made possible by acting now and creating a flexible, hybrid software system that’s equipped to deal with the coming times.