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

Hi all,

I have been working on my research for 2 years. Using Moodle and trying to control students' learning process. I have very limited materials using log data of LMS. Moodle has some problem evaluating students' learning process. I uploaded SCORM packaged lesson materials and want to get active learning result of reading lecture slides.

I hope to meet someone who have enough experience working with log data.

I have no information about Blackboard's log data. Does the BB can control students learning process?

Cheers,

Chimeg

Hello Sarah,

I am keen to see if you are still considering options for a LMS vendor and to introduce Firmwater LMS to see if we are a match for your needs.

Let me know if you are still on the hunt, more than happy to host a demonstration and provide information if so.

Regards,

Sean Power

+1 416-815 1496 x 125

spower@firmwater.com

Everything depends on your needs and experience. 

I have worked as a Moodle admin, web developer, and elearning developer in addition to teaching and supporting technology in schools. I can tell you that Moodle is in some ways an ugly beast, but it also has some in depth functionality that makes it good for course developers. It does lack a robust ecosystem of good plug ins and themes to choose from, as well, so you can spend lots of time and or money trying to make it do the extra stuff you may need (using a shopping cart or PayPal, for example because the Moodle PayPal implementation is bare bones).

Moodle is free, and it's been around  along time. But consider your needs well, and all the other LMS options. WordPress is the free, easy to use CMS out there today, and LearnDash is the plugin that turns Wordpress into an LMS. This is huge, because you get a free, user-friendly CMS  with a vast selection of themes and plugins to use along side what seems to be a thoughtfully created LMS add on in LearnDash. Truthfully I haven't used Learndash but have been following it for a while before it was officially released over a year ago, and I have been very happy to be developing with WordPress for some years after doing a bit with Joomla. I would consider the suggested JoomlaLMS suggestion in this thread as well, hopefully compare that to the LearnDash one I've described if Moodle seems like overkill or too cumbersome.

Good Luck!

Hi,

l want to make an e-learning system .. I would like to start with Moodle. from last one month I am working on open source LMS softwares and I found Moodle is the best..  but I have some doubts .. I am planning to make a system like video tutorial (digital contents) portal.. how can I upload video to Moodle and I want to add a video player in Moodle itself. ....   Now I am blank.. I don't know how to start it... expecting help from experts...  just guide me how to do this...    and give me some stuff for reference also...

I saw absorb and I really liked it...   awesome work they have done...  I also want to make one system like that...

please help...

thanks...

There are apparently some very knowledgable people here.  Would someone know if there is an easy way to implement a Mastery Learning system in Moodle or another inexpensive LMS?  Blackboard's Angel software has one, and I'm wondering if there is one on a less expensive solution.

I think you can find a way better solution than Moodle with less hassle, how about EDU 2.0? It's more modern, not that expensive and very easy to use it.

Hi everyone, this thread is really interesting but I need to ask you something. I'm looking for a LMS which could support 150k+ users and I'm only interested in analytics ( I'm working for a driving school editor and we only need to follow all students to see their evolutions ). Could you give me a tip ?

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

I know this post is now pretty old and moodle has just released their latest version (2.9), but i think ill answer anyway :) Moodle is like Jazz ! you may not like it at first but once you get used to it you start appreciating it. Just like Jazz the customization options are limitless especially if you try to integrate Moodle with another platform, for example integrating Moodle with WordPress can be an interesting proposition. However, Moodle is not for every one - I would say it is more popular in the educational sector rather than the corporate world. I have implemented/ used moodle for staff education at my workplace for 6 years and it worked pretty well but it required certain amount of web development to make it work exactly like we wanted it to.  So if you can afford a commercial LMS go for it, unless you are happy to customize etc. or live with the vanilla version.

It will be interesting to see what Articulate changes in Articulate online, considering Adobe Prime was recently launched. One of the the missing pieces in Articulate online system is the flexibility to accept SCORM packages developed in a non articulate authoring tool, i am sure this minor change will make several people happy, oh and yes social learning, mobile learning, event driven learning would be good to have too  :D