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

Hi Sarah,

My experience with Moodle is similar to many others who have posted here... difficult and confusing.  It takes a very long time to configure Moodle and get it setup properly.  You really need to have some programming or technical experience/knowledge to get it functioning just the way you want it.  The thing that really bugged me most about Moodle was the constant ongoing configuration of it.  It just took a long time to make simple changes.   I'm lucky because I have a programming background and was able to muddle through it and get it working.  I feel sorry for anyone who does not have a programming or technical background who has to administer Moodle because it's got to be a nightmare for them.  Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and asked our CIO if we could buy an LMS.  Best decision I ever made.  We tested out a bunch of them and finally selected a company called eLogic Learning.  They have a fantastic and very affordable cloud based SaaS system called the "eSSential LMS".  It's pretty sweet and was the easiest to use of all the systems we tested.  Best of all, now I get to concentrate on building customized e-learning Storyline courses and I don't have to worry about all the technical hassles that came with Moodle.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Hi Dennis,

I got a chuckle out of you building your own "poor mans" LMS.  I worked for a few companies along the way who wouldn't pay for anything so I too had to build my own LMS's.  I like to say that they were crude yet effective  :o)

Dave

Hello everybody -Took me a good hour to read these responses  and all very informative - thank you v much..-

I need some advice from you all please... here's my current situation:

Building a moodle lms using a team in India... we wanted some pretty complex features including a booking engine for tutors and students to book live lessons in for LIVE lessons. In addition we will have online preparation available to the students as well as integration to CMS Joomla for a subscription system for students.  All is going well on the programming side - however on the DESIGN side I'm experiencing some issue. Please shed some light

My questions are as follows:

1. DESIGN

Who can help us with the design of our interface? we have used a theme Aardvark the closest and only theme that looked remotely pretty... but the indian team are NOT designers - purely programmers. I need to know who can help make it look pretty. Will it cost a fortune and will it be difficult to hand over to a designer once all programming is done?  Is it difficult to customise within a theme or better to start from scratch?  Im struggling to know what the scope is for customising layout and design within a theme.

2. PLUGINS

we are at the stage of choosing the widgets/plugins/boxes on the sides of the page. I would like to know if you tell me how much time in the form of hours do the following plugins take for programmers to install:

a) instagram example in this LMS : http://vle.newbury-college.ac.uk

b) countdown plug in ( to countdown time until students next live lesson) : https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=66217

c) global chat : https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_gchat

I look forward to your response!

Katie, 

1. You might have some luck posting about looking for a theme designer/customizer on the moodle.org forums. There are also many free themes to look through there. They are very easy to customize or add your branding to. You're probably better off tweaking an existing theme than trying to have one created from scratch. I'd look through the ones available for features you like so you know what can be accomplished. There are some very nice ones out there. I'm more in favor of tweaking the Clean theme as it's easy to do from the Admin settings and works well with mobile devices.

2. Moodle plugins take 5 min. to add to a site, if that. Just add the folder to the moodle/mod folder and log in as an Admin and click the Notifications link. If your site allows it you can install add-ons from the Admin settings as well. Site Administration-->Plugins-->Install add-ons.

I hope that helps,

Jon

Hi to all of you!

I found a lot of useful information on this post about the several LMS and I would like to understand better the differences and also the costs associated with them.

My ideal LMS should have a good and simple user interface, integrated with webinar, video, podcast, forums, chat rooms and also social networks.

I'm evaluating all the options such as the free opensource platform as Moodle and the possibility to use an external partner hosting (costs??), or such as eFront that seems very easy to use an innovative to me.

I had the chance to see though, that it could be easier to use a paid software because of the support they gave you with it.

Do you have any idea about the pricing of those LMS, not just for buying them but also as year cost? Does it worth it to buy one or would you rather suggest to stick with a free one?

Many Thanks

Tommaso 

It is nice to see so many in the same boat of LMS fun as the rest of us. I'm testing the feasibility and economics of  making a switch eventually and this thread is extremely helpful.

I'm in the research stage, trying to narrow down a long list to a much shorter list of potential demos. I've chatted with a couple of companies so far and other LMS administrators and I'm keeping tabs on: Cornerstone, Absorb, eLogic, LearnUpon, GreenLight.

I am very much shying away from any open source implementations because I simply do not have the IT support to assist, nor the internal knowledge to do it myself.

My needs are as follows:

• We host a lot of videos--so I need analytics that can track per user, how many times viewed and how long
• Other analytics need to be easy-to-read and understand, exportable is KEY
• Track ILT courses
• Ability to scale to external, non-active users (can be around 1,000), but also have about 200 active users.
• A good UX for both users and admin
• We don't really need a "course" feel because our learners aren't really required "finish" a course. We're kind of using our LMS as an LCMS right now.
• SSO is extremely important for Salesforce and Sharepoint, with data sharing with ADP a very much nice to have to simply the add/subtract user function.
• Helpful IT, as well as assistance with bouncing ideas and processes/workflow

What am I missing?

Thank you Alex!

What would you suggest for a large organization ( more than 5000 people) setting up for the first time an elearning platform for blended learning? 

Hi Tommaso,

I have PM'd you.

Cheers,
Alex

Hello everybody...

I'd like to bring some contribute here...

An Lms selection is very very important; especially if you have to deal with a large number of users.

You shall consider a lot of requisites, and analyse pro and cons of each different solution.

Costs are a key point; Open-source solutions cannot really be used without experts... and often, Commercial and Open source Solutions have similar costs, either if you go for a in house installation, or if you go for a cloud/SaaS or hosted installation.

We use a Moodle distribution with an IT company focused on elearning and we are happy with it, but I wouldn't call our solution Open Source; we have customized it so much and added so many features you wouldn't say it's Moodle. This cost was very high, though!

My advice: note down a list of features you absolutely need.

I did this lately for another LMS selection, and Totara (Moodle commercial distribution) , Litmos and Docebo were the finalist, due to some features they have at reasonable costs.

@Kimberly: take a look at SharePoint LMS, it could fit your SSO needs and it has improved a lot, recently;

@Tommaso: the new Docebo 6.2 is ok for blended learning, too. If you want to have a clearer idea of costs involved in a Moodle project just PM me, we are in Italy and there are things to consider if you choose a Totara or Litmos or Avsorb hosted installation, for instance...

hope it helps

Thanks, Stefano for the thought. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that will work for us since I do not have the user support needed to pull that off. Many of the companies I've spoken with are able to do SSO thanks to the development of APIs, so I hope that works out for us.