Greetings fantastic elearning Heroes and Heroes in training! I need to pick your wealth of experience as related to LMS options. Right now all of the buzz with Open source is Moodle. I've never had any experience with Moodle but all the articles discuss how easy it is...am I missing something? The website is super confusing and it seems I need more developer skills than I have to understand? I am thinking that I may be overlooking something with Moodle, but at this point I have not been able to effectively launch this on my computer. I wanted to get your thoughts on which systems you have used both proprietary and open source. Which ones would you recommend? I'm researching like crazy and trying to demo as much as I can, but would like to get the perspective of users. Much appreciated for your time!!!

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

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

DaveP1
Community Member
11 years ago

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
DaveP1
Community Member
11 years ago

Dennis Hall said:

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

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
KatieHughes1
Community Member
11 years ago

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!
JonFila
Community Member
11 years ago

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
TommasoProcicch
Community Member
11 years ago

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
KimberlyVallier
Community Member
11 years ago

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?
TommasoProcicch
Community Member
11 years ago
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?
anoyatis
Community Member
11 years ago
Hi Tommaso,

I have PM'd you.

Cheers,
Alex
StefanoPosti
Community Member
11 years ago

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
KimberlyVallier
Community Member
11 years ago
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.