Which LMS do you use and why?

Nov 03, 2011

Hey all,

Just a quick question to you....what LMS do you use and why? 

I use Moodle 2.1.2 currently.  Why?  It seemed like a good idea at the time!  Now I'm frustrated with the SCORM reporting and interface.

Any thoughts?

-Dave

301 Replies
Sylvia  Chan

Jody Prescott said:

Does anyone use Taleo?

Hi Jody,

We use Taleo LMS which used to be Learn.com and then bought out by Taleo. To be honest it is a very big system and sometimes you almost need an IT background to administer the site. The LMS itself is highly configurable and has many functions but trying to get there is difficult part.

Not straight forward to use. They don't have very userfriendly manuals either and i have learnt to use it by Trial and Error and lots of testing.

We haven't had the best support with our Account either and considering it is a Global Account.

It does however support Scorm really well, and records the scores etc withing the LMS.

Anna Bakken

Hi Jody and Sylvia,

Sylvia - you are correct - Taleo Learn is a really big system.  I do not have an IT background, but I do have an IT guy in my organization that I depend on for help with creating the employee data file which uploads into the system. 

Jody - There is a lot of self-study.  The complexity of the system also means it is very powerful, and we have had great success in our first year with the system.  I have found the user manuals to be straight forward, easy to follow, and helpful - if somewhat overwhelming at first.

Taleo has an extraordinary user portal called the Knowledge Exchange.  I have found the answers to questions and sage advice on future configurations there, with many people (system admins and users mind you, as well as Taleo staff) that contact you one on one and go out of their way to help with any issue. 

I have had excellent support by submitting my tickets/issues through the support portal. 

My two cents.

Anna

Mike Hipsher

If you're looking for something intuitive it's probably not for you. They offer online training but it's time consuming and difficult to manage (in my opinion).    If you are a dedicated Professional Development person who does nothing but course development and posting and who works with Taleo every day, it may work, since you can become familiar with their many websites and the proprietary terms they use.   Bottom line, it's probably a good product but offers more than what we need on an occasional basis. We're looking for something a little less complicated and more intuitive with less of a learning curve. 

Ant Pugh

Carla McDonald said:

We use Absorb from Blatant Media and absolutely love it!  The Administration portal is so user friendly and the reporting capabilities are only limited by your own knowledge of using filters. You can even set reports to be automatically emailed to people on a periodic basis.  There are many features of Absorb that we find very useful and the support team is great to work with as well.

I work for a casino company and we purchased the Absorb system over a year ago.I would be happy to answer any questions about the system if you would like to contact me.

Carla


Hi Carla - I am in the process of implementing this LMS - would you mind if I picked your brains on a few items? Which would be the best way for us to chat? Skype chat?? My username is antpugh 

Thanks
Ant  

Ali Zaheer

Absorb LMS is a very good system. Very user friendly. 

For people who are on the lookout for new LMSs, I would definitely add two names: 

1. NetDimensions LMS aka Enterprise Knowledge Platform

2. Meridian LMS

They have won a lot of awards from eLearning Groups and are rated as the top two systems out there.

I have used both of them for different clients and they are amazing systems. 

All the best,

Ali

Parul Thakrar

Hi,

I am surprised no one has tried Knowledge Presenter LMS. Why not register for a free online demo using some by emailing me at parul@e-learningstudios.com.

Have a look at some of the key features here:

http://www.knowledgepresenter.com/assets/lms.htm.

There is no charge per learner, works with third party SCORM compliant course including Articulate. Have a look at some white papers in Knowledge Presenters University for further details of the LMS: http://www.knowledgepresenter.com/assets/kpuni.htm

Parul

Dominic Nicolai

Have used Moodle 9.1 for a few years now. In my opinion, it does a great job to help the student learn the material. Content and assessment material can be built into the same page. This way you can make sure that the student is understanding the presented material on the page before continuing to the next page. If you need to develop scenario or branching type learning activities, then Moodle can easily do this.

I work at Western Michigan University and they use  Desire to Learn 9.4. This system is more of a "pump & dump" type of learning environment; pump the student up with lots of information then assess whether they can dump it out again. I haven't figured out how to easily create scenario or branching activities within the LMS. Not my favorite type of system.

Articulate works great with both of these LMS.

If you are creative enough with your learning activities, then you can use almost any LMS system.

Dimitri Roman

For me an LMS should be user friendly for the end user. In my experience a lot of them do not score good on that point.

At work we use EKP from Netdimension, It delivers us a mass of management options but it does not satisfy my enduser experience. I hav e to explain to much time how to use it.

At home for testing I used Moodle, but again it dissapointed me for the end-user friendlyness and scorm support.

Then I started using ILIAS, this one scored the best, concerning scorm support, content creation and user friendlyness.

I also tried the openclass but that is still not mature.

Seeing the evolution today, going to learn anytime anywhere, an LMS does not seem to solve my need anymore. Project tin can seems to be quite prommising in that sense. I think content should be availble anywhere, where people can reach it, youtube, wikipedia, google, blogs, ... everywhere except the LMS and the only thing I want to track is if we closed the performance  gap. And most time a simple test solves this problem.

Dimitri

Marta Merlino-Calvert

My company uses Taleo. I don't know why it was chosen. If I had been here to choose it never would have happened. I have an IT background and I've spent hours trying to figure out how to add new users to the system and upload training. The system is not very intuitive at all.

When I was hired here my mandate was to push e-learning. It was a great mandate. Just wish we had all the right tools in place. At least they understand that Articulate makes my job of e-learning development easier.

Glenn Drysdale

Hi everyone,

I published a couple of articles about my journey to find an LMS, on Trainingmag.com. Perhaps they would be helpful to some.

Here's the link:

http://www.trainingmag.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-lms-part-1

We use taleo learn and it is our first LMS. So, Taleo bought Learn and now Oracle has acquired Taleo...at each step, functionality and pricing changes. But they have been very fair with us. These big enterprise systems require a big learning curve. I was told we should have two full time people running it, but we have two part-time people. We have done well, but due to very weak training offered by Taleo, it took us longer than I would have liked to get up and running. All they really had was out of date PDF manuals. Now, at least they have an online help guide, but it is still being populated. I have had very mixed results with their support portal. I will say that publishing eLearning to this LMS has not been a problem.

I developed a process for getting bids and deciding on a vendor. If that would be helpful to anyone, I'm glad to share. Just find me on LinkedIn.

Glenn Drysdale

Julie M

Glenn Drysdale said:

Hi everyone,

I published a couple of articles about my journey to find an LMS, on Trainingmag.com. Perhaps they would be helpful to some.

Here's the link:

http://www.trainingmag.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-lms-part-1

We use taleo learn and it is our first LMS. So, Taleo bought Learn and now Oracle has acquired Taleo...at each step, functionality and pricing changes. But they have been very fair with us. These big enterprise systems require a big learning curve. I was told we should have two full time people running it, but we have two part-time people. We have done well, but due to very weak training offered by Taleo, it took us longer than I would have liked to get up and running. All they really had was out of date PDF manuals. Now, at least they have an online help guide, but it is still being populated. I have had very mixed results with their support portal. I will say that publishing eLearning to this LMS has not been a problem.

I developed a process for getting bids and deciding on a vendor. If that would be helpful to anyone, I'm glad to share. Just find me on LinkedIn.

Glenn Drysdale


Hi there, thanks for the post. I would like to knwo why you decided on Taleo and what other vendors you considered through your RFP process? Thanks. Julie

Glenn Drysdale

HI Julie,

I went through an extended search for vendors, focusing mostly on the ones mentioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I also looked at a few smaller LMS providers, but decided to go with an enterprise level SaaS model for the functionality I wanted. You can google Gartner and come up with a lot of resources that way. When I had it down to my top three (Cornerstone was really the second choice), I asked for demos, and then sent the RFPs and got pricing. Learn was far less expensive than the others and gave me extras in the negotiating process, so at that point, since it had the functionality I wanted, I had a decision. I knew that the training component with Learn was weak...and that proved to be true. I went with less expensive, though I felt Cornerstone was more the premiere product--just my opinion. I could not have gotten buy-in for as much as the other quotes would have cost us.

Side note: Since Learn became Taleo became Oracle, I have no idea about their pricing model, anymore.

Hope that is helpful.

Glenn

Aileen Ruder

Marty Blevins said:

Dave Newgass said:

You guys are awesome.....thanks for all of the direction.  As we all know, each LMS comes with the good, the bad and the ugly.  My needs may be different that yours (as I am sure they are). 

Thanks again!

-Dave

We vetted about 17 license-based systems and ultimately settled on Learn.com (now Taleo Learn).

Our search was complicated by the fact that we had approximately 13 functional areas that each had a stake in the LMS and, as you said, different needs.

We broke our requirements down into "Must haves", "should haves", and "nice to haves" and rated each system on how well it met the identified needs.

Since we were looking at a commercial solution, we had several vendors come in for demo sessions. We gave each vendor a script that included the things that we were most interested in seeing (our "must haves") and asked them not just to tell us whether it could be done on the system, but to show us HOW to do it on the system. From our initial vendor responses to our checklist, you'd have thought that each system did everything. By asking to see the process, we were able to weed out some systems that would have made our day-to-day overly cumbersome.

So my advice - Get a reasonable idea of how you want your process to flow and then do a "show me, don't tell me" review.


Marty,

Great suggestion. We currently have ForceTen but are in the process of looking into adapting a new LMS. Would you mind sharing what 17 LMS you vetted and what their price ranges were? Also, what where your requirements that TaleoLearn was able to meet?

Aileen Ruder

Glenn Drysdale said:

Hi everyone,

I published a couple of articles about my journey to find an LMS, on Trainingmag.com. Perhaps they would be helpful to some.

Here's the link:

http://www.trainingmag.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-lms-part-1

We use taleo learn and it is our first LMS. So, Taleo bought Learn and now Oracle has acquired Taleo...at each step, functionality and pricing changes. But they have been very fair with us. These big enterprise systems require a big learning curve. I was told we should have two full time people running it, but we have two part-time people. We have done well, but due to very weak training offered by Taleo, it took us longer than I would have liked to get up and running. All they really had was out of date PDF manuals. Now, at least they have an online help guide, but it is still being populated. I have had very mixed results with their support portal. I will say that publishing eLearning to this LMS has not been a problem.

I developed a process for getting bids and deciding on a vendor. If that would be helpful to anyone, I'm glad to share. Just find me on LinkedIn.

Glenn Drysdale


Glenn, I sent you a LinkedIn invite to get connected. Really interested in getting a copy of the processes you mentioned. 

Jody DeWitte

Hello- Those who use Taleo Learn Center as their LMS do you use the search feature and if so can all your employees see all content or do you restrict content?  If you restrict content how do you go about that since the search feature allows for anyone who locates a WBT can launch it.   We are trying to figure out if there is a way to restrict WBT content besides adding another Learn center.  Thank you.