Ken's Top Ten List of Characteristics an LMS must have to be effective

1. Accessibility – The LMS needs to have easy, reliable Internet access from anywhere.

2. Affordability – The Return on Investment must be justifiable by the cost. If training is involved, that cost must be considered. LMSs have different pricing structures, the pricing needs to be structured to be as advantageous as possible to the largest number of customers.

3. Comprehensive – The LMS needs to cover every conceivable aspect the administrators, teachers, and learners will need to deal with including accounting, human resources, admissions, registration, and have ecommerce capabilities.

4.Customize ability and Scalability – The LMS needs to be modular, scalable, easily altered, edited, deleted, and moved to be as flexible as possible to meet the changing needs of an organization.

5. Integrate ability and Compatibility – The LMS must be able to work together with all the other common software packages customers might choose to retain. Integrates organizational requirements with personal learning needs of potential customers.

6. Interactivity – The LMS must have many options to allow administration, teachers, and students to interact in many different forms and on many different levels.

7. Maintainability and Longevity – The LMS must have ample evidence that the company will be around in the future and it will be able to continue to perform and be maintained as promised for both the present and future.

8. Secure ability – The LMS must have safeguards in place that can assure customers that none of their information is at risk of being compromised.

9. Standardization – The LMS must use either Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Enterprise Resource Management Models (ERM) software and must conform to the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM).

10. Training and Support: The LMS must be knowledgeable about both the administration and training parts of an LMS, must be able to ensure the customer will feel comfortable with their technical support, and that there will be ample training and support provided for administrators, teachers, and students in every area.