Who, in this 2020, has not had to deal at least once with LMS for distance learning or webinars?
The pandemic forced schools, training institutions, companies and professionals to look for e-learning solutions that would allow them to continue with normal activities, albeit in virtual mode.
From March until today, we have seen the proliferation of LMS (learning management system) proposed both by well-known companies in the sector and by realities born for the occasion. These facts have often generated a great confusion, especially in those who have discovered the meaning of distance learning after Covid-19.
Provider and e-learning solutions
The growth in demand for LMS has gone hand in hand with the request for information from those who approached the topic for the first time. The large amount of responses found online helps to further confuse ideas.
In fact, since March, e-learning solution providers have been paired, or compared, with tools for online meetings, which have nothing to do with distance learning. It’s like comparing pasta to meat: they are two completely different dishes. That is why in this article we try to clarify this issue by highlighting the main differences that distinguish LMS with integrated webinar modules from videoconferencing and online meeting tools.
LMS and online meeting tools: the comparison
The first difference lies at the base: the kind of needs they meet. While LMS platforms are born with the purpose to allow training and learning, online meeting tools are born to allow people to “meet” virtually.
From this main difference come all the other differences, which explain why an LMS has nothing to do with a meeting tool.
The features of an LMS with integrated webinar
Precisely because it responds to a specific need, an LMS has more complex characteristics and must have protocols that are not required for tool meetings. LMS:
- are subject to security checks related to the data of the entities that have to use them
- in order to be used, sometimes providers are required to hold specific ISO UNI EN certifications
- integrated webinar modules must ensure full monitoring by participants and, at the same time, must preserve their data security
- within a webinar there must be tools that allow to carry out a lesson: possibility to take quizzes, display video players, interactive whiteboard and the general possibility of being able to share any type of document
This explains the complexity of the structure of an LMS and why, therefore, the managed data stream is high.
The features of online meeting tools
Moving on to online meeting tools, they are born, as mentioned before, in order to allow more people to talk with each other. The fact that many of these tools are used even for learning purposes does not mean that they are LMS.
In fact, most online meeting tools:
- does not allow to monitor participants
- does not have as high security standards as those required to LMS providers; just think of the scandal of a few months ago where it emerged that the data of the users of a well-known tool meeting had ended up in the dark web
- does not provide those tools that would allow the performance of a real lesson
It is true that many of these tools also allow to many users to open webcams at the same time, but the motivation behind it is very simple: this is possible because the data stream is much smaller than that managed by an LMS.
If an LMS, with all the data it has to manage, allowed hundreds of webcams to open at the same time, it would not be difficult to witness a total crash of the systems.
To conclude
As we have seen, the main differences between LMS and online meeting tools are related to the multiple needs that have to be met. To further explain the differences, here is an explanatory diagram of what has just been said.
Among the LMS, those proposed by VITECO have the ability to meet any need: from the integration of webinars to facial recognition, up to the possibility to fully customize the platform, the solutions proposed by VITECO come from years of experience in the field of e-learning.