16 September 2020

Why Moodle Workplace might be the best LMS for you

Kenny McCormack

Kenny McCormack

Senior Solutions Architect

A rundown of the reasons why Moodle Workplace might be the right learning management system for your organisation.

Moodle Workplace is the new enterprise level learning management system (LMS) from Moodle. Moodle LMS is a well-established open-source platform that’s available for anyone to download and use as they see fit – that hasn’t changed.

While Moodle LMS started and remains hugely popular within the education sector, it is also widely used by businesses and other organisations. For many years, we have been building on the Moodle source code to provide the bespoke functionality needed by our corporate clients.

Moodle Workplace is essentially Moodle’s response to that, providing a platform that caters to many of the needs of those corporate clients and reduces the need for bespoke development. That’s probably a good place to start our list of the many reasons why Moodle Workplace is a good choice as your LMS.

Less bespoke development required

Moodle Workplace brings with it as standard many of the bespoke features we would previously have developed for large organisations. Generally, these will involve some of the things we’ll mention in more detail below, including customisation, integration with other systems and organisational hierarchies.

Multiple sites, one platform

One of the key benefits of Moodle Workplace is that you can have multiple iterations of your learning management system sitting on a single installation. If you oversee learning for a group of companies, if your organisation has different divisions that engage in very different types of learning, or if you want to reach multiple audience (e.g. staff and customers, suppliers and resellers, children and adults), you can create different versions of your LMS that are customised to provide a learning experience tailored to the learners in question.

This lowers the cost in comparison to operating several installations to serve your various audiences and also allows you to manage all versions of your site centrally. For example, even if you have five versions of your LMS to match the five divisions of your company, you can easily duplicate a custom report across all five sites to get company-wide data.

This gives you the best of both worlds: centralised control and an end to unnecessary duplication of infrastructure and workloads, but with the opportunity to delegate management and administration tasks to within each company, division or franchise.

graphical figures analysing results

Powerful reporting

That leads us on to another reason why Moodle Workplace is an increasingly popular choice among enterprise clients: its powerful reporting system. The Moodle Workplace Report Builder makes it easy to build and customise reports that give the insights you need on your learners’ progress and performance. With drag and drop functionality, it’s really quick to compile the data you want in your report. 

Your compliance reports can be easily compiled and made available to relevant managers in your organisations without the need for any administrative intervention. This filters right the way down the organisation so that every manager in the organisation could access regular, automated reports on the learning progress of their team members.

Mirror even complicated organisational structures

It’s not just reporting that can be customised to get the right information to people in the appropriate roles in your organisation. All of Moodle Workplace is geared up to replicate your organisation’s hierarchy. No matter how complicated the structure, you can set user roles that match how your organisation operates.

This includes things like management rights, security permissions and reporting lines — all of these can be reflected in the permissions you assign to each user role.

Save time with automated workflows

There are no two ways about: managing an enormous enterprise LMS can be an unforgiving task. Anything that reduces the administrative workload is to be welcomed, and that’s exactly what Moodle Workplace’s rule-based automation provides.

By setting rules that govern automatic enrolment and security management, Moodle Workplace offers the potential to save huge amounts of time. If you hire 500 people each year and they each have to complete the same six training courses within their first 12 months in the organisation, think of the time that can be saved if your LMS automatically enrols them to the training programme, automatically enrols them onto the next course upon completion of the last, then automatically issues and delivers all the certificates. So simple and yet so effective.

Personalised learning pathways

Perhaps the most important aspect of Moodle Workplace’s automation workflows deserved its own mention. This is the opportunity to use program management to create customised learning workflows for each of your learners. This might involve tailoring learning to fill skills gaps in the organisation or building an individual’s competencies in key areas. Equally, the program management tool might be used to develop intuitive learning pathways that take each of your learners through a series of courses that is based around their role within the organisation, their level of experience and their existing competencies, specialisms or interests.

graphical figure analysing results

Stay on top of compliance

Incorporating some of the aspects of reporting and automation we’ve already mentioned, Moodle Workplace also gives you a platform with which to make managing compliance far easier and much less time consuming. In common with training programmes, compliance has the potential to be a difficult and unwieldy task at large organisations, where HR, professional bodies, government agencies and external auditors might be among those demanding oversight of compliance data.

Moodle Workplace makes it really straightforward to get either organisation-wide or targeted compliance information to whoever needs it. It also makes it easier to make sure that the data they receive makes for pleasant reading because Moodle Workplace gives you all the tools you need to manage compliance levels. The automated workflows and dynamic rules we mentioned above can be used to build a compliance programme to automatically enrol learners on all of the courses they need to complete in order to achieve the required levels of compliance.

It doesn’t have to be a compliance programme; it could be compliance programmes, giving various team members different pathways to follow depending on their role. And if regular refresher courses or recertifications are needed in order for your learners to maintain compliance, you can easily manage that process in Moodle Workplace, too.

As for learners who are not taking their responsibilities seriously when it comes to compliance, you can run a report to track team members who have not completed courses they should have completed. Better still, you could schedule monthly reports to go to the managers of each team so that they can intervene and maintain compliance levels.

Customised to your brand

Moodle Workplace makes it easier than ever to achieve a clean design that’s customised to your branding without investing in bespoke development. Simple customisation might be tech industry shorthand for uploading your logo to a standard design, but that’s not the case here. The level of customisation available in Moodle Workplace is much more sophisticated than that, including making changes to the user interface to offer the best learning experience to your staff.

Integrates with your other systems

Integration with other systems is something that our Moodle LMS clients in the business world frequently need us to develop. Moodle Workplace integrates seamlessly with a wide range of other platforms, including Xero, Salesforce and many others. Integrate Moodle Workplace with your other HR systems to make setting up your organisational hierarchy and user roles a simple task.

Native app with offline sync

If your learners are usually on-the-go, work unpredictable shift patterns or simply prefer to do their training outside of work hours, Moodle Workplace gives you the technology you need to get the best out of them. It comes with a native app, which can be customised and branded in the same way as your main site.

As well as opening up the potential for training to be completed on any device and at any time, the Moodle Workplace app also incorporates offline sync. That means that, as long as the courses are downloaded in advance, your learners don’t even need an internet connection in order to complete learning. When they login over WiFi, their offline activity will automatically update on the Moodle Workplace site.

This presents a great opportunity for your learners to incorporate learning into natural lulls in their working day. Whether that’s time to kill before meetings, quiet periods on the shop floor or travel time, it’s easier than ever to undertake training.

Limited to trusted partners

While Moodle LMS is open source and can be downloaded by anyone, Moodle Workplace is being limited to Moodle Premium Partners, like us. As you’ve hopefully noticed from everything you’ve read so far, Moodle Workplace is aimed at large organisations with complex LMS requirements. Developing, hosting and supporting an LMS on that scale requires a certain level of know-how and experience.

Moodle has limited access to the platform to partners it knows have the capabilities to deliver these large projects in order to “ensure a high-quality experience with Moodle Workplace”. We’ve proven our credentials on many sizeable projects in recent years, not least the Moodle Workplace site we recently delivered for University Hospitals Birmingham’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Simply fill out the form below if you’d like to chat to us in more detail about why Moodle Workplace might be the right LMS for your organisation.

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