{"id":37600,"date":"2022-05-25T17:30:53","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T22:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/visualsp.com\/blog\/lms-or-dap-why-not-both\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T01:59:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T06:59:42","slug":"lms-or-dap-why-not-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/lms-or-dap-why-not-both\/","title":{"rendered":"LMS or DAP? Why not both!?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was at the Association for Talent Development 2022 national conference<\/span> last week. It's a large conference and there were 54 Learning Management System (LMS) vendors<\/span> (Yes I counted ) in the expo hall like Cornerstone, LMS365, Canvas, 360Learning and more. A few had actually backed out of the conference otherwise there would have been more.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"LMS
\nNow we know that most organizations have some sort of an LMS<\/span>. Mainly for employee onboarding<\/span> and compliance reasons<\/span>. However, the challenge for LMS still remains that employees only go to it when they are pushed to go there to take a mandatory compliance training<\/span> like workplace harassment, information security, etc. Other times, most employees don't even know where the LMS is.<\/p>\n

Am I right? Do you see that in your organization as well or do you have the secret to creating an employee learning culture figured out? If yes, I would Love to hear it!<\/em><\/p>\n

Even for the compliance trainings that employees take, how much of that information are they truly retaining?<\/span> What's the point if you don't have the information on hand when you actually need it - at your true moment of need.<\/p>\n

This is why I usually talk about how important it is to have a contextual content delivery platform (also referred to as a Digital Adoption Platform or DAP)<\/span> like VisualSP<\/a> that can provide continuous learning and information in-context of the user's own environment.<\/p>\n

\"dynamics
\nThen the question comes up: do you really need an LMS or a DAP is enough by itself?<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, some of our VisualSP customers<\/a> don't have an LMS but most do.<\/p>\n

I personally think there is room for both. An LMS provides opportunity for employees to dig deep<\/span> into courses and material and block out time to do that deep learning which is necessary. While a DAP provides answers at the moment of need, in the flow of work and in context of the environment<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In fact, many times you can provide a quick answer or expose a quick unit of learning using the DAP<\/span> to an employee about a topic area. For example, lets say a pulsating link appears automatically when they visit the M365 home page next time inviting them to learn about how best to manage their files. They can quickly consume the unit of microlearning and then still have the option to dig deeper into the actual LMS as demonstrated in the animated image below.<\/p>\n

\"Learning
\nIf this topic interests you, check out my article on LinkedIn<\/a> on this subject area. Hopefully you'll find it informative. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions.<\/p>\n

Read Article on LinkedIn<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was at the Association for Talent Development 2022 national conference last week. It's a large conference and there were 54 Learning Management System (LMS) vendors (Yes I counted ) in the expo hall like Cornerstone, LMS365, Canvas, 360Learning and more. A few had actually backed out of the conference otherwise there would have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7059,"featured_media":37601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"cta":[],"class_list":["post-37600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7059"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37600"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41848,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions\/41848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37600"},{"taxonomy":"cta","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualsp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cta?post=37600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}