The Next Generation LMS

As part of Chief Learning Officer magazine’s ongoing coverage of the Learning Technology Special Report, Saba’s founder and CEO Bobby Yazdani sat down to chat about the evolution of the LMS and how it needs to adapt to the changing business environment.

Describe how the industry is evolving.
The industry is at a stage where I remember 10-12 years ago we started to work on LMSes to refer to these systems as registration systems because they were originally designed to register individual e-learning events that were instructor-led. Then the LMSes were also used to manage physical assets, resources, scheduling resources for the delivery of the ILT.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve been able to redefine the LMS to make it more self-service, to bring multiple modalities to the learners — whether it’s [instructor-led] or self-service or self-assessment, virtual learning — all of those things are now enabled in your LMS.

What do you predict the next generation LMS is going to look like?
This is what we’re working on at Saba ... We asked ourselves, what are the key components of this future system and what are the key abstractions of the future system? Our core belief: A combination of formal and informal learning would exist in the future systems.

The formal learning would still support compliance – which is a very important part of any large organization. There are [also times when] organizations believe that certain core competence are the[ir] competitive advantage and they want to instill those competence or skills in the entirety of the organization and they will design formal activity around those core competencies.

In order to increase the speed of development of the organization, in order to increase the speed of change and adoption of change and speed of competitiveness of an organization, the LMS of the future needs to enable a set of other capabilities that would increase the speed of development.

The speed of development in the context of a global organization is multilingual, it’s multicultural, it’s multi-generational, it’s multidiscipline and each generation has its own level of comfort [when it comes to] development ... so we have to accommodate all those complexities in the future of learning management systems.