Jeroen Guldemond, Easy LMS: "make effective e-learning accessible to everyone"

With more education facilities and companies offering training services, it won't be long before a hybrid educational model becomes the standard.

Finding new, innovative methods of learning is on the rise as the landscape of e-learning continues developing. Accessible e-learning for everyone is challenging when users don't understand how to protect their personal data. Enhancing cyber protection across all your electronics also means investing in the best antivirus software.

For more insight into how the online learning community has transformed and what security measures are needed to keep participants safe, we spoke with Jeroen Guldemond, CEO and Co-founder of Easy LMS – a learning management system aimed to provide exceptional learning experiences for all participants.

Tell us more about your story. What inspired you to create Easy LMS?

We always loved doing quizzes to enhance our knowledge, but online there weren’t many options. So, we decided to build our own knowledge quiz platform! With a small team, we created a builder to make multiple-choice quizzes. Simple but effective! It was an instant success. Our first subscribers were De Telegraaf, a Dutch newspaper, and Knab, a Dutch bank.

The key secret of our quiz builder was using every addictive algorithm. This makes participants play the Quiz repeatedly— learning through repetition! This was fun, but we missed something. Our team’s love of learning fueled the development of our product into a full-blown learning management system. Our goal? To make effective e-learning accessible to everyone.

Can you introduce us to your learning management system? What are its key features?

We focus on consulting companies that provide training services as part of their offering. We know a lot of consulting companies are making a digital transformation. They are offering more e-learning alongside their classroom training. They love to teach but dislike spending time on administration and repetitive tasks.

That’s why we focus on the time-saving aspect. We care about our clients' time, and we want them to use it effectively. In our opinion, time should be efficiently spent. They provide high-quality training and do not send invitation emails, add participants to training material, or do other pesky tasks. We minimize their efforts and maximize their results by following three elements.

Bringing all training materials and results across their client's customers under one roof. Our clients can build digital learning environments for their clients called Academies. With the Academy, they can provide branded customized training environments to their audience while reusing the same training content. This saves tons of time.

Allowing the participants of our clients to view real-time reports. They can immediately progress the training without interference from the client. To be explicit: our client doesn’t need to generate reports anymore. It used to be a time-consuming and cumbersome process.

Offering a unique fixed pricing model! We offer three fair-priced subscriptions that don’t depend on the number of users. You don’t pay per user. So, in contrast to other systems, our clients don’t waste time on managing participants to keep the bill low.

Of course, our LMS offers all the standard features you would expect from an LMS.

Corporate training can often seem boring and time-consuming. What techniques do you use to ensure engaging and effective training?

We have a distraction-free design. Our courses are beautifully designed full-screen with no distractions. Participants can focus on the learning materials optimized for readability across platforms. Learning in this kind of environment enables improved focus and enhanced learning abilities.

In your opinion, what are some of the biggest mistakes teachers and institutions make when it comes to online learning?

Too much information on one slide, and courses that are too long and don’t have breaks. People can only concentrate for a limited period. After 25 minutes of full concentration, it’s good to take a short 3-minute break.

Get something to drink, or look outside and give your brain the space to process the information. And then back to learning.

Besides employee training, what other practices do you think are essential for a successful organization?

We believe in autonomy, freedom, and responsibility for our teams. This includes providing a truly agile work environment. We believe in short cycles with a fixed time frame but variable scope. Teams should be responsible for setting the scope of what they can deliver.

Management should set the cycle times to keep risk under control. Working on this helps to build trust and reduce the need for micromanagement while optimizing learning potential.

What would you consider to be the biggest challenges surrounding online learning nowadays?

How we can support trainers to do what they love most: train people. And not get lost in administration or get replaced by AI.

Since the education sector is your main field of focus, how do you think this industry is going to evolve in the upcoming years?

Of course, AI will be a big part of it, but we still think that the best training is by humans. We should support those trainers instead of replacing them with AI. How does a trainer benefit from AI? Especially while building an e-learning program. They don’t see it as a threat? The biggest question is how we can support humans in educating other humans.

AI might be cheaper to scale, but having an effective trainer alongside your e-learning program is something that you will carry with you for life. Who doesn’t know that one high school teacher or that one workshop that changed the course of your life? I don’t believe that AI will be able to replace that, and we shouldn’t strive for it.

In this age of ever-evolving technology, what do you think are the key security measures everyone should implement on their devices?

Get rid of WhatsApp and other social media. Use privacy-aware alternatives like Signal. The risk those apps pose to society, peoples' time, and mental health is high. I don’t think enough people see that as something they should take security measures against.

But your time is one of the most valuable assets you have. Instead of spending time on WhatsApp or Instagram, you could learn something new that you can apply in your daily or professional life.

And finally, would you like to share what’s next for Easy LMS?

We’re enhancing client reporting. We're also combining classroom and online training into one tool. We also see a lot of potential in offering online learning for clients that have participants without email addresses.

For many of us in the IT industry, not having an email address is inconceivable. But, there are a lot of industries, like factory employee training for OSHA, that don’t have an email address. How we can service those clients is the next big thing for us.