Hi guys,

Is there anybody out there in a company, who uses an LMS, and allows users to create their own LMS accounts?

(I'm not talking about self-enrollment)

On paper, it sounds like a good idea. In practice though, it invites chaos.

Chaos, because you have no control over the data integrity when the learner decides to self-register an account. No control over whether the learner can create an account for themselves correctly (or request one) and successfully identify who are their HR /learning managers/correct company subsidiaries etc.

For every account self-registration, doesn't this cause unneccessary person hours for the LMS admins to validate the data, and weed out any unauthorised requests? I'm just curious who uses such a functionality, and what time it saves them.

We've switched account self-registration off in our LMS, but obviously we have kept self-enrollment switched on.

This does sound cumbersome. We typically integrate with the ERP/HR system so we can maintain employee data in a single location.

I can tell you that self-registration is a requirement for certain public training, such as courses offered by the government. Also, some companies sell directly to consumers and use the registration process to capture leads.

This feature of your LMS may not have been intended for an internal group of learners.

Hope that helps.

Sheldon Murphy
Solid State Learning
www.sslearn.com

It is indeed a very relevant question. As an LMS provider we have seen a variety of ways customers have implemented this feature we have in our system – UpsideLMS.

We found that there are two scenarios where self-registration works well
a) a purely commercial systemwhere learners self-register, purchase courses and start learning. No control is required here unless of course there are some issues learners may be facing;
b) Channel partner training – where a learner can register self but has to be able to select the appropriate channel partner. This does introduce overheads for relevant administrators to monitor and control but not many options are there anyways.

In a typical corporate setup, due to the system being either linked to an HRMS or learners being pushed to the system through uploads, self registration is hardly used and fairly so.

So, this functionality is only useful when you are not sure who all can join and the system is open to general public (may be restricted in domain). It does save time as you could have a process of confirmation through email which takes care of a major part of the weeds. Its faster verifying a registration request than to upload / create learners manually.

I hope this helps. May I ask if your users are in public or a defined community / corporate setup? I could offer specific inputs then.

Girish Dhat
Upside Learning Solutions
www.upsidelearning.com