Best LMS for trainng 20,000 people

Dec 31, 2013

Blair Folsom
By Blair Folsom

Happy new year, I have seen many great comments in this forum and I am hoping that some of you might provide me some guidance in selecting an LMS system for our Christian ministry.  Thanks in advance for your help.

I am part of a team researching eLearning for our organization.  We currently have about 8,000 volunteers working in our Christian internet ministry.  We are growing rapidly and expect to have perhaps 30,000 volunteers in the next 4 years.  Simple math says that we will need to train about 6,000 new people each year.  In addition we want to provide:

  • Refresher training for the entire staff
  • Quick highlight training for new software features etc. that comes out every month or so.
  • Specialized training for subsets of volunteers assigned to specific areas
  • General training for staff such as health and safety etc.

Frankly, our team is frustrated.  We have looked at perhaps 20 LMS systems and can't find one that meets our needs.  For example, we looked pretty hard at Articulate.   We liked the way it operates but it doesn't handle multiple languages.  Also, we are concerned that we might want to switch at some time in the future and converting our extensive courses to a new vendor will be a nightmare.  Also, Articulate doesn't have a good way for us to manage our users - spreadsheet user data upload, for example, seems to be the best it can do.  We also looked at Moodle but our Tech team feels it is insecure (see below).  This makes us wonder if any open source LMS will be secure enough.

These are some of the other needs:

  1. Multiple Languages  Our current volunteers span about 20 languages and this will grow to perhaps 100.  Some courses will be developed in English then translated; others will be developed initially in the native languages.  We will have up to 100 people writing and editing courses.  Students need to be able to navigate the LMS in their own language and the courses must be in their languages too.
  2. Automatic Courses  Our users span the range from highly educated and tech savvy to barely able to visit a webpage.  We want users to receive an Email with a link taking them to a course where they go through the course from beginning to end with quizzes etc.  We can't have a complex interface with a lot of complicated navigation.
  3. Assigning Courses  With so many users uploading user information, course assignments etc. is a big deal.  We want our existing server to talk to the LMS and assign the courses.  Many of the systems we examined can use spreadsheets.  We could handle this but it would require a LOT of work.
  4. Capacity  When we roll out a software change that requires some training, we will want all users to be trained in a short period - a few days.  With 30,000 people to train we will have many thousands online at a time and the system needs to be able to handle this.
  5. Servers  We have our own servers which currently operate about 100 websites and a proprietary Email system handling about 20,000 messages per day.  Thus, we could provide the servers for an LMS system ourselves.  However our ministry isn't eLearning and we don't want to focus our Tech resources on this if there is a lower cost solution.  I we do manage the LMS servers internally, we need to ensure that there is no possibility that a security breach in the LMS system causes any impact on the rest of our system.
  6. Cost  Obviously cost is important to us.  We have thought about developing our own robust LMS system but have been scared away by (1) high development costs which might not make sense if our growth is slowed for any reason and (2) being tied to a single supplier with proprietary software which makes switching to alternatives difficult.  Open source such as Moodle has low initial cost but we are worried that we will need expert staff or a costly hosting service.  Proprietary systems seem to fit in the middle but the per user costs get way out of hand when we talk about 20,000+users.
  7. Security  Our tech team is paranoid about security.  It is critical that our LMS system does not compromise our other running software/servers or release user information.  Moodle was our top choice about two years ago but our tech team rejected it due to security.  We are trying to understand the basis for this.  It was probably because Moodle is complex and continuously evolving with multiple software authors suggesting the potential for back doors etc.  We still want to consider Moodle but right now it is on the back burner due to this security rejection.  Any comments about Moodle security?

If you have made it all the way through this, THANK YOU!

So what do you think?  If this was your problem, what would you do?

Sincerely,

Blair Folsom

6 Replies
Jane Maloney
over 10 years ago01/02/14 at 6:56 am (UTC)

Hi Blair,

We have been in a similar situation to yourself and I can definitely relate to Moodle being rejected on security basis. We went with Absorb by Blatant in the end as it met (and exceeded) all of our requirements.

I hope this helps if Absorb hasnt been one of the LMS systems you have already looked into. If you havent you can find them here.

Kate Salvan
10 years ago01/27/14 at 7:22 am (UTC)

hi, Blair

After reading your LMS requirements, i can suggest looking at JoomlaLMS

http://www.joomlalms.com/features

as regards your requirements:

1)Joomlalms is accessible in 14 languages, multilingual courses can be created + you can translate files by yourself if a necessary language is not available;

2) you can customize the interface in any necessary way. The navigation is simple: by clicking a course, a learning path or SCORM module will be opened and all unnecessary icons can be hidden;

3) i am not sure what system you use, but we have LDAP plugin for synchronizing users and the support  team can develop any other if needed;

4,5) capacity is not a problem at all. JoomlaLMS can handle any number of users if server allows;

6) it is a good choice for a company that has 20 000+ users.

It is consistently at the top of our Low CostLMS options, regardless of delivery of number of users. ( the price per learner in a Standard license for 100 users is 3$, while the license for 10 000 users already offers 0,2$ as the price per learner )

it is possible to purchase a license with a smaller number of users and upgrade later;

7) JoomlaLMS is a component for Joomla, which is a rather secure CMS, that is why, if your site is using Joomla, you will not face any security issues.

 if you have any other questions, please contact support team directly http://www.joomlalms.com/helpdesk.html

Alexandros Anoyatis
over 9 years ago10/25/14 at 1:17 pm (UTC)

Hi Blair,

Have a look at OpenOLAT. Sure it's not as well known as Moodle or the gazillion Moodle forks out there, but it blows most of them right out of the water AND checks all 7 of your listed requirements.

  1. Multiple languages/can even operate as a translation server for your own platform translations.
  2. Email notifications every step of the way (can be configurable). Also, you can configure access or visibility even by using regular expressions (have yet to see another LMS achieve that).
  3. REST API so your server/shopping cart/script can "talk to" and automatically assign users to a course (amongst an array of other things).
  4. Capacity. This is where most of these LMS's fail. This one has a light footprint. The original LMS of which OpenOLAT is a fork of, is still used by the university of Zurich serving more than 40,000 of users.
  5. No one can really guarantee you that, but this is not your average wordpress or joomla addon script/moodle fork, but a Java based platform.
  6. When you're talking about 20K+ users you will need an expert even if the system runs flawlessly. But other than that, you should be fine.
  7. LMS's aren't typically the most secure platforms, generally speaking. This is also true due to the nature of the 20 yr old SCORM standard which is by itself generally insecure and can in many cases be manipulated. If you are willing to live with that, then OpenOLAT is a very robust platform.

I'm not affiliated with the company that develops OpenOLAT, but as a long-time user and being involved in earlier incarnations I urge you to set a demo up on a linux server, then try any other LMS, commercial or not, and watch how slow everything feels when not using a fully AJAXified interface.

Cheers,
Alex

Norm Morin
9 years ago04/08/15 at 2:45 am (UTC)

My college uses Moodle even with our security paranoid IT group policies and hasn't yet been hacked. Moodle regularly releases updates to deal with any security issues. The bottom line is if the worlds best bank systems can get hacked, no LMS is invulnerable to being compromised. If any make that claim they are just plain lying. There's really no reason to have any sensitive user data on an LMS so that even if it does get compromised it would be irrelevant. So if you will have a user base of 30k even at $2 per user that's a pretty hefty bill for the myth of security that could be better spent on quality course development IMO.

Tomáš Rezler
almost 9 years ago06/12/15 at 9:29 am (UTC)

Dear Blair,

I've already written it in some other topics here but I can repeat for you again with no problem :-)

I work in the company which has been using the LMS http://training-online.eu/ and everybody including the chiefs are satisfied and mainly - it fulfills ALL YOUR REQUIREMENTS 

Not only they offer basic languages (such as en, cz, fr, de, ru, es, pt, pl), but also everybody can set his own language.

And what's more - you will appreciate the cost, because you don't have to pay any monthly fees - you pay only for courses you order. Thats the biggest advantage in comparison with other LMS companies I guess.

I wish it helped you :)

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