Essential Jobs for Each Role in a Learning Management System

Learning Management Systems (LMS), like any other system, are comprised of many parts that all serve the function of the whole. What those necessary functions are differ vastly, but for a LMS, they should all serve the purpose of delivering effective and efficient training. Roles are designed to streamline the differences in these functions by dividing the tools and responsibilities between them.

For CoreAchieve, there are five roles: administrator, attendee manager, author, instructor, and learner, with the former four being critical for a smooth learning experience.

A Quick Look at The Roles

Before looking at the some of the essential jobs for the four roles of administrators, attendee managers, authors, and instructors, it would be helpful to have a brief overview of each.

Administrators have access to all the features in the system. Their role is at the top of the hierarchy, but depending on the size of the organization, they may be the only one used. Since administrators have access to everything, they can take on any other role or manage the roles underneath them.

Attendee Managers are responsible for managing learners within the system. For example, attendee managers can create profiles, enroll learners into courses, and create learner groups. This role is most useful whenever an organization has a high number of volume of learners that constantly needs to be managed.

Authors create the learning content and courses. They have access to all of the content building features and will most likely be the ones who are creating content outside of the CoreAchieve system as well (like graphics, videos, or posts).

Instructors are the ones are the helm of courses, they grade assignments, promote discussions, assign work, enroll learners, and interacting directly with learners. This role is the face of the course, instructors can lead either virtual or in-person sessions and give credit to those learners who meet the standards.

Essential Jobs for These Roles

Now that the basic idea of these roles has been established, there are essential jobs for every role to make sure they are doing.

Administrator

Defining the What and Who of Roles

The first job of the administrator should be determining how many roles are needed and who should be trusted with those roles. Questions like “how many learners will be in the system” or “how fast will learners leave/enter the LMS” will help establish this step.

Clearly Define the LMS Goals

Administrators direct the show and, as a result, should be able to clearly define what goals you want the LMS to help your organization complete. This will help determine what all the other roles should determine their actions by.

Set Up Accurate Records

While systems like CoreAchieve feature automatic reporting, not all of it might be useful to your organization. So, as an administrator, you should determine what records are going to be the most important for your organization’s goals.

Provide Feedback

Since administrators have established the goals of the system, they also should criticize the system and provide feedback to push the whole towards those goals.

Review Content

Like the job of providing feedback, the administrators should review the content that is going to be given to the learners. All in an effort to guarantee that everything is moving towards those goals.

Attendee Managers

Coordinate Learners’ Roadmap

The most important job of an attendee manager is to ensure that whenever a someone begins to learn they are in the system and enrolled in all right places. Time and effort could be wasted if a learner is assigned the wrong route to take, so it is vital that from the beginning, learners have a clearly defined and correct path established by attendee managers.

Create Useful Learning Groups

Learning groups can dramatically improve the workflow of administrators, attendee managers, and instructors, but only if the groups are usable. For example, having a group of newly added learners will be helpful if they need to take something like onboarding courses but not if they are split into separate departments that all have their own unique learning.

Keep Records Outside of the System

While this might not be completely necessary, keeping records outside of the LMS may increase productivity by making useful information like learner information accessible in multiple places. Furthermore, CoreAchieve can read-in and create learner profiles from CSV documents, so it might be easier to import the data into the LMS in bulk than entering it one-by-one.

Authors

Developing a Learning Roadmap

Since Authors are the people who are creating and refining the learning material, they need a clear understanding of what the goals of each course is. Simply making the goal “too train people on x subject” isn’t enough—what are the specific ideas need to be conveyed and what is their hierarchy.

Conduct Thorough Research

While an author might not have to research the subject that they are creating content for (although some research should done for accurate information), they will most likely still need to be able to find external content to bring into the course. Content like videos, images, and graphs that pertain to the topic can be found online through research.

Know What Makes Courses Engaging

This is the most difficult of all the authors jobs, but knowing how to do it will make your training much more effective. There’s no catch all for making courses engaging because topics naturally varying in potential interest, but generally, including things like storytelling helps this.

Collect Data On Courses

Authors should collect as much data as possible because they will be able to address any problems with the courses. However, changing because of the feedback of one or two users will not be as justifiable as changing based off data collected from many, many learners. By evolving courses off data, authors can make the training as smooth as possible.

Instructors

Engage with Learners

Instructors are the people who are the closest to learners and, in some cases, may be the only people that learners know above them. Therefore, instructors should engage with learners on some level even if the training is hands-off as then learners can put a face to the organization. A great way to do this would be to create some instructor-led sessions.

Interpret Data

This task isn’t just for instructors, but they since are the closest to learners, may be able to provide reasons for the data. Instructors can look at the data and ask relevant questions to learners providing more insights than any other role gets.

Divvying Up a System

Listened above are not the only jobs that should be done for each role. A LMS like most systems at a large-enough scale need a division of responsibilities to run as efficient as possible and roles are the simplest way to divvy up those responsible. All the roles above are given a set number of features and access tailored to their role to guide anyone in them to the essential jobs.

Some maybe turned off by managing a LMS especially if all those jobs are essential, which is why CoreAchieve offers ways to do those jobs for you.

Get started with CoreAchieve for free.

Photo by Clark Van Der Beken on Unsplash