What is Adobe Learning Manager?

At its most basic level, Adobe Learning Manager is a Learning Management System (LMS). An LMS is a web-based application primarily used for hosting, delivering, administrating, tracking, and reporting learning activities. The concept of LMS dates back to the mid-1990s and first appeared in the higher education sector. Since then, LMSs have evolved to include features such as collaborative learning, social learning, gamification, mobile learning, and more. They have contributed to the advent of new instructional design strategies (such as the flipped classroom) and have moved beyond the tight confines of the education sector to venture into corporate training. Nowadays, LMSs can be found in a very large variety of organizations. From primary schools to large business corporations, the LMS has become a central component of the learning and development strategy of a growing number of organizations.

The main duties of a traditional LMS fall into the following basic categories:

• Training management and delivery.
• User and role management.
• Online assessments and tracking learning progress.
• Automation of various tasks (such as issuing badges and certificates).
• Reporting and analytics.

Adobe Learning Manager being an LMS, it is able to fulfill all these missions. But ALM has a lot more to offer! So, in the next few sections, we’ll explore some of the features that set ALM apart from most other LMSs.

Adobe Learning Manager is an enterprise LMS

ALM has been developed from scratch by Adobe. It has not been purchased or acquired. It has been designed, right from the start, as an enterprise LMS. So, even though you can use ALM in a school or university, it is in the corporate environment – more precisely, in large organizations with lots of course material and learners – that the unique features of ALM make the most sense.

Some of the features that establish Learning Manager as an enterprise LMS include the following:

• A dedicated manager view to help managers enroll team members into courses and track their learning progress.
• The ability to integrate off-the-shelf learning content from other ALM accounts or third-party providers.
• Extensive reporting capabilities.
• Integration with other Adobe enterprise-grade services or with the existing ecosystem of tools used in your company (such as directory services, virtual classroom tools, CRM, CMS, ERP, eCommerce, and more).
• The ability for learners to self-enroll in courses they deem relevant and an integrated AI-powered recommendation engine to help learners make their way through massive course catalogs.
• Etc.

Adobe Learning Manager is a cloud-based LMS

There are hundreds of learning management systems out there! Some of them are proprietary software, while others are freely available open source systems developed by communities of users. ALM falls into the former category. It is a closed source proprietary software developed by Adobe.

Some learning management systems can be self-hosted. This means that you can download the system and install it on your own servers. On the other end, ALM is cloud-based. This means that Learning Manager is entirely deployed on Adobe servers and that all of the hosting and IT-related burdens are managed for you by Adobe. This cloud-based approach is in line with the growing trend that’s been observed in recent years, as more and more organizations decide to move a growing portion of their tools and services to the cloud.

A word on the infrastructure

Adobe Learning Manager is deployed on Amazon Web Services with other cloud partners, such as Akamaï and Brightcove, the latter of which offers industry-leading video content delivery. This allows ALM to scale up to very large deployments, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of regular users.

This model is known as the Software-as-a-Service model, also known by its acronym SaaS.

Updating Adobe Learning Manager

One of the main advantages of the SaaS model is how the system is updated. Since ALM is entirely hosted and managed by Adobe, all updates are directly deployed by Adobe on the server and are immediately available to all ALM customers.

Adobe constantly updates Learning Manager. As a customer, there is nothing to do on your side to benefit from the latest update.

Note

You can find information about the latest updates at s.

The release notes of all past updates can be found at https://helpx.adobe.com/learning-manager/release-note/release-notes.html.

Adobe Learning Manager is a learner-centric LMS

ALM offers a Netflix-like experience: a very large number of courses are available for learners to choose from, just as if you were browsing Netflix’s extensive catalog for your favorite movies or series!

This is in sharp contrast to most LMSs used in the education sector, which are designed to help teachers implement their instructional strategies. While it is entirely possible for organizations to implement their training strategy using ALM, the overall experience relies on the learner being in the driver’s seat. This mindset is one of the key elements that makes ALM a Learning eXperience Platform (LXP) rather than yet another good ol' LMS.

You should now have a better high-level understanding of what ALM is and what differentiates it from other LMS platforms. In the next section, you will explore how ALM fits in with the other tools from Adobe. You’ll discover that there is a lot of extra power to leverage when Learning Manager works hand-in-hand with other Adobe products.