This short post is an edited excerpt from the updated Spicy Learning Guide, an essential compendium of 101 tips to improve your learning strategy. We’ll be releasing the new Spicy Learning Guide at Learning Technologies 2013, so visit us at Stand 33 to collect your free copy!

A learning management system isn’t just a place to host e-learning courses. It’s an essential part of the way learners experience your content. So here are our top five ideas to improve your learning management system.

1. Make it a go-to destination

Create genuine ‘what’s in it for me’ reasons for learners to login besides the standard ‘welcome message’ on your LMS. Include an internal blog and links to useful web-services like the holiday booking system and the company wiki.

2. Allow users to upload content

Many learners ‘store’ and share files related to learning (like presentations) via the email system. This isn’t ideal. How about allowing them to upload private files to share with others to the LMS itself? It’s another reason to return.

3. Make it a game

There are many ways to ‘gamify’ your LMS and reward learners for participation. One measure is to introduce a personal dashboard which tells learners how active they are and how that compares it to the average.

4. Build in social feeds

Help your learners move from courses to resources by including live feeds of online content-hubs like Twitter, Youtube and Google Reader. It’s very easy to include a widget or plugin which allows learners to search in Wikipedia from within the LMS.

4. Make it mobile

Mobile learning has arrived. e-Learning courses (not just resources) which work across all devices will be widespread very soon. This means your LMS needs to be mobile optimised. The newest versions of most common platforms are – make sure you aren’t left behind!

Visit Saffron Interactive at Stand 33 to try out our new learning platforms, or request a demo.