You gotta love Spring. The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the mercury is rising, … Oh, and a fresh update of your favorite learning management system just got deployed to the Cloud.
This TalentLMS release brings the usual assortment of enhancements and workflow improvements, but also lands several major new features to help you take your eLearning courses to the next level.
Sit comfortably and enjoy an iced drink, for in this post I’m going to present them to you one by one.
Instructor-Led training (ILT) support
Instructor-led training is this release’s headlining feature, and something a lot of you have been asking us to support for quite a while.
In case you’re not familiar with ILT, it’s about supporting classes held in a traditional classroom-style fashion within an eLearning platform. ILT style training may be held in a classroom, office, conference room or on a virtual location (through video conference, in which case it’s known as a “webinar”).
TalentLMS allows you to seamlessly combine eLearning and Instructor-Led training, by letting you add, edit, manage and monitor ILT classes the same way as you would your conventional eLearning classes.
ILT support in TalentLMS has been designed to be easy to use but flexible enough to cover all the common cases. In case you want to learn more about this feature, we’ve devoted a whole blog post to it, which you can read here .
Reporting for duty
Our new scheduled reports will save you a lot of time if you use the reporting functionality regularly.
For each exported report you can now instruct TalentLMS to create and send a report to a list of designated recipients on specific intervals (weekly, etc).
This means that once you’ve settled on the kind of reports you want to see, you get to have them delivered on your mailbox automatically. For larger businesses or organizations, this is also the perfect feature for keeping the upper management happy and in the loop about how training is going.
Have a field day
This release brings a number of extensions on custom fields as well.
Specifically, we increased the maximum number of custom fields to 20 (which, to paraphrase Bill Gates, should be enough for everybody). Moreover, these fields can be different for different branches, and you get to configure their ordering according to your preference.
A GIFT to you
Ever wanted to import test questions to TalentLMS? Well, now you can using the GIFT and AIKEN standards.
If those sounds like Greek to you, both GIFT and AIKEN are text based import/export formats for eLearning platforms, allowing you to interchange questions between systems.
AIKEN is the simpler of the two, supporting multiple choice questions with a single answer, while the GIFT format is more powerful, allowing you to import questions of various types (multiple choice, wrong/right, matching etc).
Throw a private party
TalentLMS now allows you to restrict the email domains that can register to the system.
If you chose to use this feature, you get to define a list of email domains that will be accepted (something that’s known as a “whitelist” in security parlance), and all others will be rejected.
If you intend to provide access to your eLearning portal to just about anybody, this new feature won’t be important to you, but for companies or organizations wanting to restrict access to their employees or to a list of trusted domains, this is big news, and is available as of this moment.
Coupons 2.0
The coupon functionality that you’re already familiar with in TalentLMS has been revamped in this update too.
Improvements in this release make coupons more precise and flexible, by giving you the capability to add certain restrictions to how the coupons are used, such as determining a maximum number of usages, and making tickets valid only for specific courses.
Conclusion
There’s a new TalentLMS update out there. Besides the usual roster of improvements, there are several major new features to checkout, including: support for Instructor-Led training, scheduled reports, GIFT/AIKEN import, custom field extensions, coupon improvements, and email domain whitelisting.
All of these are available as we speak without any installation or deployment needed on your part (aren’t Clouds wonderful?). Enjoy your new features, and let us know if there’s something you might like to see next in TalentLMS.
