In today’s dynamic business environment, the performance of your employees is paramount to success. While hiring the right talent is crucial, their ongoing training and development are even more vital. This is where Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become indispensable, offering modern solutions for businesses to create, deliver, and track training programs. Whether for onboarding new employees or upskilling existing teams, an LMS provides the essential tools to meet your business’s training needs. Zoho Learn emerges as a powerful contender in this space, offering a comprehensive platform to enhance your learning initiatives.
What is Zoho Learn?
Zoho Learn fills a significant gap in Zoho’s application suite, providing a dedicated LMS solution that was previously lacking. While Zoho Connect and Zoho People offered limited training capabilities, Zoho Learn arrives as a fully-fledged, cloud-based LMS platform, seamlessly integrated within Zoho One.
Zoho Learn is designed to empower your team with effective knowledge acquisition and retention. This robust platform enables you to build manuals, write articles, create engaging quizzes, foster collaborative spaces, develop comprehensive courses, and generate insightful reports for training employees and external stakeholders. Despite being a relatively new LMS platform, Zoho Learn launched as a mature and feature-rich application, ready to meet the demands of modern businesses. Let’s explore the key features of Zoho Learn and understand how it can transform your training strategy.
Knowledge Management: Building Manuals and Articles
Upon entering Zoho Learn, the first section you’ll encounter is Knowledge. This area serves as the repository for your articles and manuals, forming the foundation of your knowledge base. Think of manuals as your comprehensive textbooks and articles as individual chapters within those books. Let’s delve into the process of creating both manuals and articles in Zoho Learn.
Manuals
To begin, click on the purple + icon to initiate the creation process.
You’ll be presented with options to create an Article, Manual, or Space.
Notice that initially, you might not have any manuals created. Let’s try clicking on Article to see what happens.
As indicated, you need to establish a Manual before creating an article. This logical structure mirrors the book and chapter relationship – chapters (articles) are organized within a book (manual). Click Continue to create your first Manual.
Initially, the only available location might be your private space. Spaces, which we’ll explore later, are necessary for sharing manuals and articles with specific teams or groups. For now, proceed by clicking Continue to create your manual in your private space.
Articles
After creating the Manual, Zoho Learn intelligently prompts you to create an Article immediately. Enter your desired article title and click Create.
You are now in the article editor, ready to develop your first piece of training content. Zoho Learn provides a rich text editor with various formatting options. For advanced features, including inserting images, videos, tables, and references, click on the three horizontal lines located in the top left corner of the editor.
This menu unlocks a range of formatting tools to enrich your articles. Once your article is complete, you can choose to Publish it to make it live or Save as Draft to continue editing later. For this demonstration, let’s proceed with Publish.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your first article for your Manual, “Getting Started With Zoho Learn.” On the published article page, you’ll find quick access features. You can attach supplementary files by clicking “+Add Attachment” and add tags using “+Add Tags” for improved searchability within a large knowledge library. The hot buttons on the right allow users to bookmark, favorite, or comment on the article, enhancing engagement and interaction.
To add more articles (chapters) to this manual, simply click on the +New Chapter button in the bottom left corner or the + icon in the bottom right corner.
Learning & Courses: Building Engaging Training Modules
Next, let’s explore the Learning section, which focuses on building courses and lessons. It’s important to note that creating courses in Zoho Learn doesn’t necessitate pre-existing manuals or articles. For instance, if your training primarily involves assessing existing knowledge through quizzes, you can directly utilize the course and quiz features.
A key application of Zoho Learn, and LMS platforms in general, is the ability to host Zoho Learn Webinars as part of a broader learning curriculum. While the original article doesn’t explicitly mention webinars, Zoho Learn’s robust course structure can seamlessly integrate live or recorded webinars as learning modules. You can use webinars to deliver interactive training sessions, product demos, or expert talks, and then embed recordings and related materials within your Zoho Learn courses for on-demand access. This blended learning approach, combining structured content with interactive webinars, can significantly enhance learner engagement and knowledge retention.
Delving into every aspect of the Learning section would require extensive tutorials. Therefore, this article will highlight some of the standout features within course creation.
Lessons
Similar to a traditional classroom setting, the Lessons section is where you structure your course content. This involves creating learning lessons, assignments, incorporating videos, and designing quizzes. Zoho Learn offers instructors remarkable flexibility with customizable settings, including sequential or date-released lesson delivery, quiz pass/fail percentages, retake options, timers, and more. These granular controls allow you to tailor the learning experience to meet specific training objectives and learner needs.
Spaces: Fostering Group Collaboration
Spaces in Zoho Learn are dedicated environments for sharing content and fostering collaboration around specific topics. These are invaluable for both structured training and project-based collaborations. Spaces enable you to categorize training materials and collaborative projects efficiently, enhancing learning focus and providing a valuable resource for future reference. Once your Manuals and Articles are finalized, they are typically organized and made accessible within relevant Spaces.
Reports: Tracking Progress and Performance
The Reports section in Zoho Learn provides powerful analytics to monitor course effectiveness and individual learner progress. Once your e-learning ecosystem is populated with courses and quizzes, you can easily track essential metrics. While you can create custom reports, Zoho Learn’s built-in reports offer excellent pre-configured snapshots of key data points. Gain instant insights into employee course completion rates and course performance analytics with Zoho’s comprehensive reporting capabilities.
Ready To Elevate Your Training with Zoho Learn?
If your organization already utilizes Zoho’s ecosystem, Zoho Learn is a top-tier LMS solution that seamlessly integrates with your existing tools. For businesses new to Zoho seeking a user-friendly yet powerful LMS, Zoho Learn is highly recommended. With competitive pricing, starting at just $1 per user for the standard plan and $3 for professional, Zoho Learn offers exceptional value in the LMS market.
To further enhance your learning journey with Zoho Learn and potentially explore how to integrate zoho learn webinars into your training programs, consider subscribing to our newsletter for upcoming video tutorials and in-depth guides. Discover how Zoho Learn can transform your employee training and development initiatives, creating a more knowledgeable and skilled workforce.
