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

Sarah:

I suggest reaching out to superhero Phil Mayor about Moodle. I consider him an expert on it. --Daniel

Yes, I agree with Daniel!

Phil could really help!

But apart of the LMS choice, I'm afraid you definitely will need a partner.

You could give Totara moodle or Docebo a try! It's free and you can get confident on administering  courses and users.

Switching to stability, hosted and managed installations in server farms can free you from IT worries and performances concern...

I personally use a cutomized hosted Moodle installation (similar to Totara) clustered on 9 servers in 3 different italian cities, and this allows thousand of simultaneous users.

Yes, because it's matter of concurrent users and web requests... they could easiliy down your server, if IT infrastructure is not appropriately sized to allow multiple requests. ...

Not sure you need me here, moodle is a little quirky but as others have suggested when you get used to this it will do most of the things you want without having to do much work.

I would agree with Stefano you need a partner, especially if you want to run Totara.

Concurrent users is something that is difficult to calculate (the user needs to be accessing the database at the exact same time to be concurrent otherwise you could have 3,000 users logged in not doing anything with out having a problem on a single server (probably an exaggeration).

Moodle is Scalable and most good partners will ensure your service does not go down.

Like I say, not much to add here, there is plenty of documentation out there, the moodle site when you get to know it is full of stuff (it is built on moodle which i dont think was the best option for the site).

If your goal is to host it yourself then there is a slight learning curve to that. I remember when I first installed it without any prior knowledge it took me about two days and a few breaks to calm down when things didn't go as planned. I have found that the documentation for installing under all kinds of circumstances is easily available with a little searching.

To answer your questions about why it might be superior, I've just started blogging about that. You can see my first (and second) post about it here: http://mrjonsclasses.blogspot.com/2013/03/moodle-vs-insert-lms-part-i.html I'll likely have even more to say about it in the next few days as I have time to write. At this moment, I don't think there's anything out there that is even close. Not to mention, if you have any courses you'd like to start with you could always see if you can find one on MoodleShare.

Hope that helps,

Jon

@sarah

If you are planning on having active forums (assuming that's what you mean by chat boards) as crazy as it sounds, Moodle 2.4 still does not allow email subscriptions on one discussion within a forum. (You have to subscribe to the entire forum and thus users would get emails not necessarily related to their specific interests) There's talk about changing forums in 2.5 to a version created by Open University (ForumNG) which allows individual subscriptions per thread, but since you referred to creating a robust community, if you choose Moodle, I think you'd probably want to use something else for the forums part. I think there was one plugin that tried to make an adjustment to standard Moodle forums, but I never heard much about it. You could install the NG plugin from Open University, but they don't have one ready yet for Moodle 2.4. 

In your situation I think Stefano is right on with suggesting Docebo as one possibility if for no other reason you don't need IT to begin with, no upfront costs, and you don't have to worry about total users, but users actively accessing within the last month. The annual Totara license fee (not hosting) is based on number of users and there's a pretty big bump from 3,000 to above that number. 

Todd

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.

I know you guys know you are amazing, but please let me reiterate....everyone is so amazing here!  Your insights shared here as well as in previous posts about LMS systems has been incredible helpful for me to hone into 4-5 options for us to further review.  We still have a lot to define as far as the specific of how we want the experience for user and administrator to flow which will help us as we vet through the different options. 

Based on your feedback, reading reviews, blogs, testing some of the software, talking with vendors I've come up with these 5 options to explore further based on our basic needs:

Moodle (w/partner) *Currently have calls out to different Moodle partners to better understand their approach and pricing.

Docebo

Absorb

Totara

Desire2Learn *need to confirm they support selling of courses

Since Moodle sparked this whole conversation.  Thank you for those who validated I wasn't crazy    With your comments combined with a long conversation with my little brother who is in the IT world, it all makes sense now why it didn't make sense initially.  I've decided that Moodle is like the Matrix...all of a sudden it becomes clear and you can see the code ;)

If you have additional insight please feel free to share, this is great information!

I'll be sure to follow up with this thread once we have spent more time vetting through to provide another point of insight. 

Thanks again everyone!!!

I have worked with MOODLE for the last 4 years and I love it - however we had it hosted by an external company (onclick) so any upgrades etc they where there to advise.

From a course creater/reporting point of view it is lovely, it really does not take long to learn and I have had good feedback from those who use it.  In fact 81% of our organisation accessed this in the last year, considering we are a government ran organisation I feel quite proud of that.

Take Care

Clare

I have worked extensivly with Moodle, Docebo, Ed, SumTotal, Saba, built my own "poor mans" LMS, and modified or worked with about 7 or 8 other unmentionables.

In every case below, I've customized the LMS's at the code level and can say the following:

Free systems:

Moodle: Great software architecture, very scalable, supports many languages, can be modified at the code level bloated as heck, terrible work-flows (although you can create your own work flows) for users and worse for admins.

Docebo: Clean and simple software architecure, great user workflows - that you can customize totally, very easy to customize (via code, or just admin configuration) and you can edit in all 32 languages, create custom client portals with their own work flows, courses, catalogues, etc..., not recommended to 100+ simultanious accesses.

Paid:

Ed: Amazing LMS, do anything with anything, supports any SCORM, and AICC, incredible dashboard, supports Certifications, skills, competencies, production planning, feature rich like no other, very like and intuitive work flows, extremely expensive (like 150,000+ to get started with your own server, or about 10.00 / month per active user for hosted) - This system was originally designed for aerospace manufacturing.

SumTotal, far too expensive, user work flows are terrible (example: My Completed Courses is a collapsed (hidden) areas below My courses (rather than a tab t the left where all other user page navigation is), Admin functions are divided into 4 round buttons accross the header, after you select one, you get to guess which of the 5 menus below you need to use to do a task, and the pain goes on...

Saba, got 150,000.00 so they can send their expert to answer your questions, then give you the product to install, next, you still have to pay them per user when you exceed teh number that the original cost covered, btw - you are not allowed to customize it at code level - oops, been there - done it, not goin' thar agin'

My own LMS: Absolute failure compaired to all of the above (although I ran simulators off it which no one is yet doing today), also not available anymore

I hope this information can be of help.

Best Regards,

Dennis Hall

If you're looking for free LMS solution you can also try Sakai http://www.sakaiproject.org/ — it's more user-friendly than Moodle.

As for paid LMS, I prefer Docebo. I agree with Dennis, it's good solution for up to 100 trainees

if you want to store your courses somewhere, you can use Articulate Online or iSpring Online.