Need help with LMS decision....is Moodle that great?

We've set up, configured, and customized  Moodle for many government agencies unable or unwilling to pay for a commercial LMS. You'll find opinions all over the place. If you want to get valuable insights, I respectfully suggest that you tell us a bit more about your specific requirements. I would not recommend Moodle or any other LMS without knowing how, why, where, and with whom you intend to use it.

Generally speaking,  Moodle's strengths include its flexibility and vast global developer community. It's particularly well-suited to academic environments, especially those with dedicated IT departments who can support it.  There are also some great companies dedicated to hosting, supporting, and customizing Moodle. 

I personally would not  consider Moodle  if you're a small training department solely responsible for every aspect of LMS setup, maintenance and administration. Hosted solutions like Articulate Online are probably a better starting point for that set of needs.

Dennis, thanks for the great information!!!  Some of it aligns with what I have been finding.  The timing of your message couldn't be better because I have a new project that needs to find an LMS. 

Do you know if most LMS require you to prepopulate the learner or can the learner set up their own account? 

Hi, how many users should you manage? Are you speaking about thousands of users?

I'm asking you because both LMS stability and LMS administration are really important point to consider. A server of your own could not serve many users, unless you are heaviliy supported by an It Dept. (als in terms of networking and balancing issues...)

Are you considering a LMS installation at your site, or a hosted or cloud one? That is another important point....

A truly "free" LMS is hard  to use in a professional way for large numbers of users; a Cloud or hosted installations are the best choice, in my opinion...

you could start with a minimum number of users and then scale gradually...

Moodle Totara, Docebo, eFront, are all great! Absorb is amazing! 

To be sure and avoid mistakes, start with Totara or Docebo, according to your budget...if I may suggest

hope it helps

I have used Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Edvance360, and Moodle.  I concur with you, the Moodle website is confusing.  Even though Moodle is open source there are costs associated with it.  For instance, hosting, maintenance, updates, programming modules, purchasing modules, etc.  The Moodle design is very plain and did not seem user-friendly.  We ended up select Edvance360, www.edvance360.com, as our LMS.  It is a hosted platform and upgrades are as easy as the click of a button.  Edvance360 also had all of the tools (discussion forum, tests, Wiki, chat, lessons, etc.) that we were searching for in a LMS.  The customer support is awesome too.

Moodle and eFront innovative? Weeeeell...no...not really... 

Contrary to popular belief, there hasn't been much innovation in the LMS field for the past 10 years, unless you call integrating a "Like" button to a platform "innovation" - I certainly don't.

The things is that when it comes to features most LMS's are on par with one another. The keys to selecting a LMS, is true conformance to standards and overall performance (footprint and load) - the two factors they don't tell you much about in the first place...

I would argue that the interface is of secondary importance (initially), as it is something that can be easily remedied (a decent developer will be able to provide an alternative design fairly easily) and would cost much less than the pain and suffering you will inevitably experience should you select the wrong LMS for your business.

Hope this helps,
Alex

Hi Loyics:

Having 150k+ users in registered in the system means you will have millions of records in the DB. Typically that may also equal 1 or more thousand simultaneous users (users using the system at the same time).

You need some serious horsepower behind that requirement. I would recommend whatever LMS solution you find, that it be an enterprise distributed type of system.

An example that I have worked with technically is Saba. Although I'm not a fan of the many user interface aspects of Saba, it has all the right architecture for a high performance AND distributed system. Any LMs will NOT be free at this level. Even free LMS software would require a great deal of computing hardware, network infrastructure, planning, purchasing, installation, and configuration costs. You will also really need to look at the life cycle cost of operating such a venture, planning the user workflows to minimize user confusion and lower support costs, tailoring system notifications and related triggers to also minimize support costs, then hiring a support desk to assist the remaining users learners when even all that up front planning did not help the person who has a poor internet connection and insists it is your platform at fault, etc.

Other important aspect of this type of LMS are location(s) and certainly bandwidth. An example of these aspects would be to consider using multiple access point around the world (multiple portal located in your highest traffic areas). So if your analytics tells you Europe is an a region you have 30% of your registered users AND of that 50% of them are actively using courses simultaneously (25,000 simultaneous users in the system downloading content and uploading SCORM or Tin-Can records, you will need to plan for Gigabyte bandwidth, massive amounts of Session activity,  and a very high performance database.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Dennis Hall

Hi Sarah,

I agree with you, I found the Moodle site to be very confusing. I haven't worked with Moodle directly, but I have worked with a product called Totara through a company called Kineo. Totara is built off the Moodle platform to create a front end LMS. I really enjoyed the product. 

Right now, in my current organization, we are exploring the Absorb LMS. This has been by far my favorite LMS. I think it looks the best and has been the easiest to use. They gave me full access to a sandbox, which I've been playing with over the past several months. They take user interface design seriously, and it has paid off (both on the users end and admin end). They're also pretty cheap as compared to a few other vendors.

Personally, I'd suggest staying aware from Oracle and SumTotal. I've worked with both of these platforms and they've been subpar and expensive.

Good Luck!

-TIm

At first I found Moodle very confusing, but you need to get it set up correctly. I found moodle is very good for classroom resources and lessons done concurrently, but not as good for totally online resources. It then takes a lot of customising.

Hi Sarah,

I've been using Moodle (1.9, 2.2 now upgrading to 2.4) for some time now so I can tell you what I know:

- Moodle is open source which means that you can have custom modules bulit for your company if needed

- it is free for as many users as you want (you pay for hosting services only)

- Moodle has a great community, new versions are available every year (version 2.4 released in December, 2.5 coming up in May), I believe future releases will be much more user friendly (in terms of setting up and managing)

- it works well with the most popular tools (Articulate, Adobe, etc.)

- it will fully support mobile users shortly (Moodle Mobile app is now in beta)

On the contrary, you have to keep in mind that:

- you have to install and set it up on your own (I recommend that you have the IT person install it for you, setting up is 

not problematic since you have tons of books and resources on the subject)

- there is no technical support, you solve your issues on your own

- if you want to customize it, you either buy a custom theme or have a graphic designer build it for you

- let's be honest, Moodle could be a tad more user friendly, but once you get the hang of it, it is not that bad

I think I covered the most important stuff. Let me know if you need more info.

Cheers,

Marta

easiest way to try Moodle - go to  http://bitnami.org/stack/moodle - download installer - runs as a virtual machine on laptop/PC 

also look at eFront (much less cluttered, and free)