I recently took some time to cash up on the Open Arms Learning Management System with Emma Riceaweston, the user-centered design guru behind so much that this innovative company does. So the Open Arms review. I've long been a fan of the Autouring Environment Jack tour, now fully integrated into the Open Arms Suite as Open Arms creator. It is now even better by the way for building e-learning. So the Open Arms Suite contains a learning management system, a catalog of e-learning built and editable by users and creator, bespoke development services and a tool to add existing e-learning to the learning management system. This income is a bundle or as individual components. Open Arms is certainly an innovative, full service provider. Let's take a look why. User-centered design. Well the core principle of this platform is around user-centered design and this does provide for an excellent UI and UX. Instead of falling into the trap of being all things to everybody, the design approach is based around natural tasks undertaken by users. That's learners, managers, administrators, quality assurance professionals and more. To make this happen, Open Arms comes with a number of variants, business, apprenticeship delivery, school, college and university. Okay, then the learning management system is designed to provide interfaces for specific roles in the requisite organisation, meaning that the principles of user-centered design are maintained. Accordingly, we have a learning management system that is a masterpiece in user-interface and user experience. Having in each case, hit the Goldilocks spot, not too much and not too little. The usability from a learner perspective is designed to be familiar and in this case a Netflix look has been designed in. It is important to note that this is not just a superfluous or passing resemblance to Netflix but an interface designed with absolute detail and care for the learner engagement. Learner engagement with a Netflix style user interface. Real care is taken not to overwhelm learners but the Open Arms Learning Management system allows content to be provided as and when it is needed, when sophisticated learning pathways are created. Open Arms calls these programs of learning. Programs of learning can be pulled together quickly and easily in a very friendly and intuitive interface. No doubt learning from higher education, it is now possible for organisations to create sophisticated programs of learning for employees that cover several hundred days with absolute precision. Yet as we noted earlier, the learner is not overwhelmed or daunted at the prospect. Rather supported through the program with calendaring, alerts and reminders, and the assignment of points to specific learning assets can be used to add a touch of gamification if so required. This platform is not exclusively dedicated to delivering learning programs. Simple enrollments are possible as well. IELT can be organised and tracked and the creator tool has a nice complimentary task management feature which adds that the sophistication of learning engagement and as well suited to an organisational induction program. There is a degree of social interaction. Skype is integrated and the ability of the learner to profile themselves is a very nice feature. The learner dashboard is very good. Where this learning management system gets sophisticated is the reporting align to the learning program which is exceptionally granular and really focused on use by measures in an organisation. This allows the learning program to be hugely supportive while because it is hugely informative. I am particularly taken with the reporting exporting to Power BI and live updates can be seen to learner performance through this integration if you really want to that is. Nonetheless, this is increasingly how learning will be reported so it is good to see. Putting together the learning program is the role of the curriculum manager. There is a super level of tagging available. Courses and resources can be pulled in from Moodle or Vimeo for example and Open Elms has its own API to allow much of this curation to happen. LTI supported in case you wondered. Naturally you can add courses developed in Creator, no longer called Jack tour. It is still actually more so very capable of allowing very visual learning to be created quickly and easily. Since the learning management system are integrated, neat features like user feedback can be incorporated into your learning or then the same system. This learning assemblage process, my term, is very good in how it pulls things together and really delivers on the mission to support learners building up knowledge, skills and behaviours. Ease of management. The manager or management is central to much of the thinking around Open Elms and really does give him or her the ability to manage learning in their area of responsibility with lots and lots of workflows, email features, very powerful but effectively templated, no messy HTML here, permissions and reporting that are truly innovative to use. Yet another great example of user-centric design, making data work for the manager, not the other way around. Organizational Open Elms is smart. The options of how your organization's structure can be modeled at system setup, thereby allowing the learning management system to accurately reflect location or occupation. This is so well done. It is close to being my favourite feature. Too many learning management systems make this such hard work. Open Elms presents the choices needed and gets it organised. The same can be said about organizational roles and permissions. Learning management system reporting with Open Elms. Reporting is very powerful for managers and trainers, with a large library of standard reports to use as well as the option to create custom reports. Multi-tenancy for training businesses or extended enterprises can be provided. So who is using this platform and what does it cost? Well, Open Elms has some serious fans in the corporate market, as it integrates with Salesforce and some of the very largest talent management platforms out there. Several household brands use the learning manager system and they have clients in pretty much every sector. Users include the likes of Bauer Media, Compton University, the Civic Nuclear Constabulary and Erdker. As for price, let's say you get a lot of features, lots of excellent design and consequently a lot of engagement from learners and managers, usually the really tough group to crack for the price of a simple SaaS solution with half the feature sets and nowhere near the design excellence. In summary, how to sum up Open Elms is quite a challenge, led by user-centric design without doubt and that really sets this learning management system apart. A real focus on management involvement in learning, which I find very refreshing, and tells me that Open Elms is very on trend, as more and more organisations seek to go beyond course completions and simple scores. Open Elms, in short, is really for the modern organisation that is into investing in its workforce, and as I see it, using the Open Elms Learning Merge system is a very good way of getting great results from that investment.