BlogMary Novak
Mary is an EdTech digitalization expert with a passion for transforming educational experiences through innovative technology. With a deep understanding of the latest digital trends and tools, she excels at helping educational institutions and organizations implement effective digital strategies.
LMS Requirements: The Hands-On Checklist to Use Today
If you’re planning to create a learning management system (LMS), working with requirements is an inevitable step along the way.
Requirements gathering is the first thing you’ll deal with after all these demo calls and follow up hustle: as soon as you choose an LMS development company, the project manager will offer to discuss what your platform should do and how it should deal with it.
Project managers know their job: in 39% of cases, software development projects fail because of poor requirements gathering.
Well, you’ll need to buckle up: the procedure of gathering the functional requirements for LMS is complex and somewhat cumbersome.
The good news is that you can start in a light mode by composing the general vision of your e-learning project firstly. We’ll help you with that in an instant!
After reading the article, or even skimming through the text, you’ll be able to answer three essential questions:
What does the term “requirements” imply?
Which LMS requirements are vital?
Which functional requirements are vital for your LMS?
What is more important, we’ll provide you with an LMS requirements checklist you can share with your LMS vendor to save time and effort on hashing out the details of your project and to simplify the LMS implementation process.
Let’s move to the core of the issues!
Requirements vs features: what’s the difference and which go first
If you google the “learning management system requirements checklist” request, you’ll find out that in the majority of articles, the narration revolves around features.
That’s completely okay! Moreover, we’ll focus on features as well. But firstly, we’ll put all the ducks in a row by finding out what are “requirements” and “features” and why they are mentioned interchangeably.
The thing is as simple as building a house: requirements are the foundation, while features are the rooms, windows, and finishing touches that bring everything to life.
If you look at the topic from another perspective, requirements answer the question “Why?” while features answer the question “How?”.
Here is one more interpretation for sheer clarity: requirements define the “what for”—the purpose and goals of the LMS—while features are the tools that help achieve those goals.
And the final statement to drive it home: each group of requirements matches the respectful group of features. That's what we’ll demonstrate to you through three examples.
Why not jump straight to features instead of dwelling on requirements? Because starting with requirements is a beneficial approach that makes development more concise and well-grounded.
A requirements-first approach prevents you from missing vital features that might otherwise need to be added later—a much more expensive process than developing them as part of the initial plan.
Why the list of requirements for an LMS 1 and LMS 2 will be different
Can you think of two organizations that are twins in business goals, organizational structure, and operational processes? We can’t, and that’s perfectly reasonable—every organization is unique in how it delivers its core activities.
Naturally, this means that approaches to the learning experience are just as distinctive. Your strategy for building a learning process will stand out too; that’s why defining LMS requirements is so important.
The way a learning platform is shaped learners’ experience depends on the following organizational properties just to name a few:
Industry. An LMS for healthcare needs functionality for compliance employee training and certification tracking. For a company in the defense sector, the highest data security and compliance with standards like GDPR or HIPAA are a must.
Learning goals and culture. If the organization values continuous, self-driven learning, it might prioritize an LMS with self-paced courses, gamification, and social learning features. A more structured, compliance-driven organization may need fixed training paths with strict progress tracking.
Employee skill level. An organization whose employees differ in level of expertise, benefits from adaptive learning paths that allow learners to proceed at their own pace or based on their existing knowledge.
Business processes. If the organization values regular performance reviews, the LMS requirements checklist will include robust assessment tools and customizable reporting to track and evaluate employee progress. Moreover, these tasks may require an LMS that integrates with other internal systems (e.g., HR, CRM, or project management tools).
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