The coming of the internet had greatly benefited human beings and has affected various aspects of human life positively. With the growing popularity of online educational courses and degrees, there have been a set of software tools and multitudes of computer programs which have been designed to facilitate the communication of knowledge from the tutors to the students. Such computer programs which considerably aid e-learning are referred to as Learning Management Systems or LMS. These systems are not only adequately equipped for extensive course management but they also offer several other services as well. These include collaborative learning, online computer based training, training workflow, learner self-service and many other variants. The learning management system is extremely vital for the spread of online education and it is necessary to point out here that the learning management systems can function on a variety of platforms like Microsoft .NET and Java EE. In recent times, the advancement of technological tools have also ensured the development of various web-based and open source LMS software tools which are believed to further facilitate its functioning.

It is well known that the LMS is extremely useful for aiding the spread of education online and even the virtual learning environments which are used in vogue by the online educational institutions are a variant of the LMS and perform a variety of functions. These includes providing a synopsis of the course structure and course details, duration of the course, learner messaging, gradation of coursework and assessment of scores, display the resultant scores etc. It has also been noticed that the learning management systems are often very beneficial especially in case of corporate courses and they offer various benefits. Thus they allow the facility of enrolling automatically in case a person conforms to the prerequisites as stated in the very beginning. Moreover, since the coursework is totally performance oriented, it is of great help for the corporate professionals as such tasks allow them to assess their skills and shortcomings and thus improve on them.

The expansion of online education has immensely aided the marketing of the learning management systems and they today constitute a separate industry which trades in the various learning management system software applications. It is estimated that the learning management systems comprise a market share of about $500 million. In the United States of America , these learning management systems are prevalently used for aiding the scores of online courses.