How Long Is A Piece of String?

I’m excited to introduce another fantastic blog by our guest blogger Ant Pugh.  In this post he asks, “How long is a piece of string?” when it comes to adding content to your LMS.


So I haven’t blogged on Litmos for a while – the main reason being that I have been working hard on managing our (relatively) new Learning Management System (LMS). And although my passion and primary job role is creating learning content, I have been spending as much, if not more time, managing the LMS – and have really enjoyed it.

Just over a year ago, we put forward the business case for a Learning Management system in order to provide our customers and employees with an environment within which they could access online training wherever they were located around the world. (And in doing so, saving us thousands of dollars in training costs).

And fine – that seems to be working quite well. Job done right?

Well as we all know, one of the biggest advantages of cloud-based software is that we are constantly benefiting from all the new features that are being introduced, on what seems like a weekly basis. With every update that our LMS undergoes, we see new and exciting features made available that we can use to enhance our learners’ experience.

And this really is fantastic and makes me feel confident that we chose the right LMS for our business.
But our system is now becoming a victim of it’s own success! Because the LMS has the power to direct different types of content to different groups of people, and because the LMS is quickly becoming one of the learners’ “go-to” locations for knowledge, we are starting to see interest from other parts of the business in using the LMS for other purposes:

  • “Maybe we can just record the Webex and add it to the LMS for anyone that missed it?”
  • “We have just commissioned a cool promo video – could we host that on the LMS?”
  • “We have a new procedure or regulation – could we use the LMS to learn about this and then test them to make sure they read and understood it?”

And my response thus far to all of these questions has been, “Yes! Fantastic! Bring. It. On.” Our LMS is definitely the perfect place to host this content, some obvious reasons being:

  1. We can quickly and easily make content available to a pre-defined group of people and ensure it is hidden from others – much more secure than a public website.
  2. In a few clicks we can generate detailed reports based on who has viewed the content, in doing so gauging their understanding and getting their feedback on the subject.

But my issue is that I am in L&D! I work in Training! My LMS is for education?!! And yes, this content is all essentially educational, but where do we draw the line? Can we start using it to host product information? Should we use the LMS for company announcements? How long is a piece of string?

Would be great to hear your opinions and experiences on this subject…