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

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 

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

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.

Moodle is great.  Our institution recently went through the evaluation process and looked at all of the major contenders in the market to assess the best platform which would meet our needs and expectations.  We are a non-profit education system focusing mostly on graduate studies (psychology, law, nursing).  We decided to migrate to Canvas by Instructure (http://instructure.com).  

We just finished migrating the majority of our affiliates from eCollege to Canvas, and are now working on the conversion process to migrate one of our affiliates from moodle.  Canvas seems to have all the benefits of moodle, including open APIs, while being hosted on Instructure servers.  For small institutions like ours, it is cheaper to have Instructure host the LMS rather than maintain an open source platform locally.  

The functionality of Canvas is fantastic as well.  It is ahead of the game in terms of mobile accessibility, integration (LTI), and functionality.  I'm not trying to sell the product for them, but these were just our conclusions based on our assessment of the LMS landscape.  D2L is also a fantastic product that you might consider.