Atlassian’s Confluence is an enterprise collaboration tool used by hundreds of companies all over the world.
It allows employees to communicate and work together on different projects, driving business success, regardless of whether they’re working in the office or from home.
A Confluence learning management system (LMS) is the logical next step for any company that uses the platform for its business needs.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the benefits of using an LMS with Confluence, how to choose the best one, as well as several use cases to provide better context.
Can you use Confluence as an LMS?
Yes, you can use Confluence as an LMS.
You can use a plugin or app to give Confluence LMS capabilities. Alternatively, you can integrate it with a fully functional LMS solution.
Atlassian’s Confluence is a great collaborative workspace and information database.
Confluence users can create wikis, add information, and generate e-learning content from within the platform.
You can also make new or use existing Confluence pages, import images or videos, and other types of content to train, onboard, upskill, or reskill employees.
To put it simply, businesses can use Confluence as an LMS or integrate it with an existing one to take advantage of all the features and functionalities that a professional LMS has to offer.
As a side note, you can use either Confluence Cloud or Confluence Server to integrate an LMS. The Confluence Data Center is like the server version but at scale.
The main difference between them is that the cloud version is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, whereas the server and data center versions are typically hosted on a customer-side server.
That said, what are the benefits and advantages of integrating a professional LMS with Confluence?
Benefits of using an LMS with Confluence
Since Confluence is a collaborative project management tool, employees can work together on different projects and ideas on the same platform.
By also integrating a learning portal into the same workspace, they don’t need to change systems to engage with training courses or e-learning content.
Companies can get the following benefits when using an LMS with Confluence:
- Cost-effectiveness: With an LMS integration, businesses can reduce their employee training costs. They can use Confluence to create Smart Courses and use the LMS integration or plugin to deliver it to employees and other stakeholders. This will help save both the time and money normally associated with a stand-alone LMS.
- Improved user experience: As mentioned above, an LMS integration with Confluence can create a seamless experience for learners. They don’t need to leave the platform to access the e-learning content they need. This makes it easier to find the right training material inside Confluence, increasing the user experience in the process.
- Flexibility: Users may also benefit from added flexibility by integrating an LMS with Confluence. Most LMS systems don’t have built-in authoring tools for content creation. Yet, with such an integration, you can use Confluence to design and create e-learning content and tutorials, while using the LMS plugin to deliver that content in the most efficient way possible.
While not an exhaustive list of benefits, these three examples highlight why companies should integrate a third-party LMS with Confluence.
Let’s now look at several use cases of a Confluence LMS.
What are the use cases of a Confluence LMS?
The exact use cases of a Confluence LMS depend on the specific LMS features that you’ll be integrating with.
That said, there are three main use cases that every professional LMS should be able to fulfill.
- Employee training: One of the main functions of any LMS is employee learning and development. Employee training plays a critical role in helping employees learn specific skills to boost their performance in their current roles.
- Employee onboarding: The process of onboarding employees revolves around helping new hires get accustomed to their new roles and responsibilities as fast as possible without overburdening them with too much information too quickly.
- Compliance training: The importance of compliance training cannot be overstated. It’s a process of educating employees on the laws, regulations, and daily processes that go with the job.
With a Confluence-compatible LMS, you should be able to do all three types of training mentioned above.
You should also be able to achieve the following:
- Use Confluence content to create courses and quizzes: As a content management system, companies can use Confluence to create content. They can use that content in their LMS to design and implement engaging tests, quizzes, and e-learning courses.
- Make information easily available: By integrating the Confluence platform with the company’s LMS, they’ll also be able to make knowledge and e-learning content information more easily accessible to users.
- Track and evaluate learner progress: Professional LMSs also come equipped with in-depth data tracking and analytics tools. These allow companies to track and evaluate learner progress while using Confluence’s content for training purposes.
- Create a social learning experience: With the right LMS integration, companies can also benefit from social learning. Since Confluence is a collaborative tool, learners can upload and share content from the Confluence wiki straight into the LMS. Learners can then use it as either a social learning asset or for other forms of training courses.
So, what do you need to consider when choosing an LMS for Confluence?
How to choose a Confluence LMS in 4 steps
Choosing the right LMS for Confluence depends on several factors specific to every individual company and its needs. These are the steps for a comprehensive LMS implementation project plan.
These four steps will help you determine which type of LMS will provide the best benefit to your organization.
Step #1: Assess your needs and requirements
The first step is to determine what exactly you need from an LMS.
You’ll need to determine your LMS requirements, such as the type of e-learning content you need, be it in the form of employee training, onboarding, upskilling, reskilling, compliance training, etc.
You’ll also want to determine what exact features and functionalities you need to achieve your business goals.
These can include things like training course creation and e-learning content module management.
You might also want self-enrollment and single sign-on capabilities, video conferencing and webinar functionalities, user progress tracking and data analytics, social learning, gamification elements, branding, white labeling, etc.
To help you assess all of your Confluence LMS needs, it’s best to talk to all of the stakeholders involved.
Ask your HR, management, and L&D teams, and even consider asking end-users about what they want or expect from the LMS.
This way, you stand a better chance of covering all of your company’s needs and requirements with the right LMS.
Step #2: Understand your options
When it comes to turning Confluence into an LMS, you have two main options.
- You can choose an app or plugin, which will effectively turn Confluence into an LMS. This is generally a good option if you want both your content and employee training to happen in one place. The downside of this option is that you’ll not make the most of what a dedicated LMS can offer. You can find most of these plugins or integrations in the Atlassian marketplace.
- The second option is to integrate Confluence with an external LMS. This is a more comprehensive approach that combines the benefits of both Confluence’s collaboration and flexibility with an LMS’s full functionality.
Step #3: Choose an integration or plugin
Judging by the two points above, you’ll need to choose which of the two options is the better alternative that can fulfill your needs and match your business goals.
Generally speaking, if you want to take advantage of most of the features, functionalities, and capabilities of an LMS, you’ll need to integrate rather than choose a plugin.
As a Confluence-compatible, cloud-based LMS, Docebo provides a whole host of features geared toward employee learning and development.
Docebo makes great use of social learning by creating opportunities for team members to ask questions, share knowledge, ideas, and expertise, and drive company-wide collaboration.
Additionally, the platform makes it easy to centralize and access e-learning content in a knowledge base or wiki, which can stand as the foundation for its social and informal learning initiatives.
It helps learners stay on top of the wiki by sharing new posts and pages, either as formal learning objects within training courses or as informal assets for social learning purposes.
Docebo’s Learning platform also uses AI to create personalized learning paths for each individual user.
This includes auto-tagging, virtual coaching, and content suggestions to allow learners to be more self-sufficient while admins are more free to focus on optimizing training programs.
It also implements other training methodologies like blended learning, mobile, multimodal, and microlearning for increased flexibility and knowledge retention.
In addition, it includes multiple gamification mechanics such as leaderboards, badges, contests, and various digital rewards for user engagement and even community building.
It specializes in both customer and employee training, as well as compliance and sales enablement.
The video highlights how a company can implement Docebo’s LMS in its daily operations.
Last but not least, you should also consider scalability when choosing a Confluence LMS.
Step #4: Research its scalability
Before deciding on what LMS tool you’ll choose for your Confluence platform, it’s best to research the LMS’s scalability.
Provided your company grows and expands, you’ll need to make sure that the LMS can handle the additional learners while continuing to provide the same level of benefits as before.
Consider looking over customer reviews and testimonials to see how others were able to scale their operations and whether the LMS was able to keep pace with the extra workload.
Now it’s up to you to decide what type of LMS will go best with your Confluence platform to best fulfill your business goals and end-user needs.
Now over to you
Whether you decide to go with an app or plugin or you opt for a dedicated LMS integration with Confluence, you’ll need to make sure that it’s able to cover all your needs and will scale with you over time.
Docebo is one such LMS that provides plenty of features and functionalities to fulfill most companies’ needs.
Schedule a demo today and see what Docebo can do for you!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
You ask, we answer.
Is Confluence SCORM compliant?
Since Confluence is not a dedicated learning management system, it is not SCORM compliant. This means that it doesn’t support SCORM files natively.
But by integrating with a SCORM-compliant LMS like Docebo, businesses can access these types of file via Confluence.
Can I create quizzes in Confluence?
While it’s not possible to create quizzes and other tests through Confluence alone, it is possible to do so by using either an LMS integration or a plugin.
Users can create content in Confluence, which they can turn into quizzes in the LMS plugin or integration.
