Accord LMS

What it is

Accord LMS is a cloud-based learning management system for organizations that train employees, partners and customers, and often all three at once. The home page pitches it to organizations of every size, from small businesses to multinational enterprises, and promises to raise learner knowledge, compliance and satisfaction while cutting the administrative time, cost and effort of running training. The site is published by Noggin Guru, LLC, whose contact block gives an office in Cary, North Carolina, and its recent blog posts carry titles such as "Noggin Guru Quarterly AccordLMS Update".

The product is organized around what the site calls learning solutions: employee learning, customer learning, compliance learning, channel learning and extended enterprise. It also has industry pages for education, franchise, healthcare, hospitality, legal, nonprofit, retail and technology, each framing the same platform for a different kind of organization.

Administration and enrollment

Most of what the home page lists is aimed at the people who run training rather than the people who take it. Its "Why Choose the Accord LMS?" list names an attractive, easy to navigate interface, personalized learning plans, unlimited administrators, connected or private teams and sites, internal, external and franchise learners, automated course enrollment, scheduled custom report delivery, and fair pricing with no hidden costs.

The "Work Smarter" panel describes smart administrative tools that can automate learner enrollment, assignments, certification renewals and customized report delivery. For an HR or training manager, the practical effect is that recurring compliance courses and recertifications can be set up once and run on a schedule instead of being chased by hand.

Administration can be split across an organization. The extended enterprise page describes multi-team administration: a network of LMS admins and child admins who each manage different teams, learners and content independently, with report definitions filtered for each admin level. A regional manager or a partner administrator therefore sees the people and figures they are responsible for, while a central team keeps the global view. The home page's "Industrial Strength" panel sums up the architecture as unlimited teams and roles, customizable administration, a multi-tenant design, and a private codebase and database.

Portals for employees, partners and customers

The extended enterprise page carries most of the product's distinctive material. Accord promises to "deliver customized learning to both internal and external learners through an unlimited number of privately branded portals." Each portal can be white labeled with its own layout, graphics and URL, and registration, features and content can be set separately for employees, partners and customers. Centrally managed content can be delivered to any portal, and both global and portal-based administration and reports are included.

The page groups these audiences in three ways. For a distributed workforce, it describes targeted learning for employees wherever they are, with competencies and certifications tracked from a centralized catalog. For channel partners, it describes giving dealer networks, resellers and franchisees access to learning assets, operations guides and promotional materials through their own privately branded portals. For customers, it describes portals that demonstrate product usage and hold training guides and FAQs, with the aim of reducing support load by answering questions before they arise.

That customer side is where Accord moves into customer education. The extended enterprise page suggests using eCommerce to monetize courseware, and the nonprofit page describes an eCommerce storefront through which members can buy content, creating a revenue stream for the organization. Training can be delivered online, virtually or in a classroom, with access from any device, and the nonprofit page mentions mobile and social learning tools as a way to reduce reliance on classroom space, travel and instructors.

Content and reporting

Organizations can bring their own training, and the nonprofit page also shows a library of ready-made courses, stating "Over 20,000 courses available." The suggested titles shown there cover organizational awareness (harassment prevention editions for employees and for colleges, ethics and business conduct for government contractors, a bully-free workplace course, whistleblowing), a long run of communication courses (business writing, punctuation and grammar, email etiquette, presentation skills, virtual meetings, American Sign Language), conceptual thinking, and cooperation and teamwork (coaching skills, conflict management, working with a diverse team). For a small organization without an instructional designer, that library is a quick way to stand up compliance and soft skills training.

On reporting, the nonprofit page says administrators can generate reports quickly, see how long a learner spent in a course, and see what the learner mastered or struggled with, then use that data to improve the content. Reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery. A testimonial on the same page, from Ralph Brenner, Senior Technology Architect at the Nonprofit Committee for Children, says "Accord's reports indicate exactly how many teachers have taken our training."

Hosting and support

Accord is delivered as a hosted cloud service. The home page's "Future Proof" panel describes scalable architecture for growing organizations and extended enterprises, with on-demand AWS processing and bandwidth resources, and a blog headline announces "Accord LMS is moving… to Amazon Web Services." The "Play It Safe" panel says the platform secures training, assets and records with what it calls "industry leading reliability, availability, security and performance." The nonprofit page adds that the Accord cloud takes care of hosting, so a small team can spend its time on the learning itself.

For help, the site links a support portal, a technical support page and a sales contact, and says the company is "committed to providing the highest quality of customer support." The resources menu adds customer case studies, white papers (including a buyer's guide to choosing an LMS), release notes and a product download. The feature menu has separate sections for enterprise features, customization, implementation management and integration.

Pricing and trial

The home page's main call to action is "Get a Free Month", and the industry and extended enterprise pages invite visitors to schedule a free demonstration. The site has its own pricing page, and the home page's selling point on cost is "Fair Pricing and No Hidden Costs". Peter Paasch, Director of Information Technology for Wisconsin Hospitality Group, is quoted on the home page saying Accord gave his company the reporting it wanted "that others didn't, and it is reasonably priced."

Customers and track record

The home page says "Over a million Learners worldwide have the training they need, when they want it." The case study cards give learner counts per customer. Committee for Children, in education and nonprofit, uses Accord for customer learning with 20,000 learners, after replacing an LMS that was difficult to navigate and integrated poorly with its other systems. Catalyst Learning, in education and healthcare, uses it for customer and compliance learning with 20,000 learners, wanting one system for its website, registration and training. ZeOmega, in healthcare and technology, uses it for employee and customer learning with 1,000 learners, aiming to cut training time and expense. Erin Gillaspy, eLearning Delivery Manager at SPAN Safety, is quoted recommending Accord "to any organization looking to implement an Extended Enterprise LMS." A blog post title reads "Accord Ranks: 2022 Best LMS Software for Ease of Use."

The nonprofit page also cites McKinsey & Company research finding that training nonprofit leaders led to "increases in membership and revenue four times greater among the trained leaders than in the untrained," as an argument for training in that sector rather than a result attributed to Accord.

Who it suits

Accord fits organizations that train more than one audience: a franchisor with franchisees, a manufacturer with dealers and resellers, a software or services company that wants customer portals, or a nonprofit training staff and volunteers. The unlimited branded portals, delegated admins and filtered reports are what such an organization would otherwise have to assemble from several systems. Small and mid-sized organizations will find the free month and the ready-made course library a quick way to start.

A team that mainly wants a creator storefront for selling one course to the public is not the audience here. Accord's eCommerce exists, but the product is built around administration, enrollment rules and reporting for organizations, and its pages spend far more time on those than on marketing tools.