Which LMS do you use and why?

http://www.didakos.org/

Dokeos's son, but so much better...

Have used Moodle 9.1 for a few years now. In my opinion, it does a great job to help the student learn the material. Content and assessment material can be built into the same page. This way you can make sure that the student is understanding the presented material on the page before continuing to the next page. If you need to develop scenario or branching type learning activities, then Moodle can easily do this.

I work at Western Michigan University and they use  Desire to Learn 9.4. This system is more of a "pump & dump" type of learning environment; pump the student up with lots of information then assess whether they can dump it out again. I haven't figured out how to easily create scenario or branching activities within the LMS. Not my favorite type of system.

Articulate works great with both of these LMS.

If you are creative enough with your learning activities, then you can use almost any LMS system.

For me an LMS should be user friendly for the end user. In my experience a lot of them do not score good on that point.

At work we use EKP from Netdimension, It delivers us a mass of management options but it does not satisfy my enduser experience. I hav e to explain to much time how to use it.

At home for testing I used Moodle, but again it dissapointed me for the end-user friendlyness and scorm support.

Then I started using ILIAS, this one scored the best, concerning scorm support, content creation and user friendlyness.

I also tried the openclass but that is still not mature.

Seeing the evolution today, going to learn anytime anywhere, an LMS does not seem to solve my need anymore. Project tin can seems to be quite prommising in that sense. I think content should be availble anywhere, where people can reach it, youtube, wikipedia, google, blogs, ... everywhere except the LMS and the only thing I want to track is if we closed the performance  gap. And most time a simple test solves this problem.

Dimitri

My company uses Taleo. I don't know why it was chosen. If I had been here to choose it never would have happened. I have an IT background and I've spent hours trying to figure out how to add new users to the system and upload training. The system is not very intuitive at all.

When I was hired here my mandate was to push e-learning. It was a great mandate. Just wish we had all the right tools in place. At least they understand that Articulate makes my job of e-learning development easier.

Hi everyone,

I published a couple of articles about my journey to find an LMS, on Trainingmag.com. Perhaps they would be helpful to some.

Here's the link:

http://www.trainingmag.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-lms-part-1

We use taleo learn and it is our first LMS. So, Taleo bought Learn and now Oracle has acquired Taleo...at each step, functionality and pricing changes. But they have been very fair with us. These big enterprise systems require a big learning curve. I was told we should have two full time people running it, but we have two part-time people. We have done well, but due to very weak training offered by Taleo, it took us longer than I would have liked to get up and running. All they really had was out of date PDF manuals. Now, at least they have an online help guide, but it is still being populated. I have had very mixed results with their support portal. I will say that publishing eLearning to this LMS has not been a problem.

I developed a process for getting bids and deciding on a vendor. If that would be helpful to anyone, I'm glad to share. Just find me on LinkedIn.

Glenn Drysdale

Has anyone used DigitalChalk with Articulate?

Hi there, thanks for the post. I would like to knwo why you decided on Taleo and what other vendors you considered through your RFP process? Thanks. Julie

Hi Glenn,

Thank you for the link to the article.  Is Part 2 available?

Jody Prescott

Hi Jody,

Part 2 is at:

http://www.trainingmag.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-lms-part-2

Or, you can just search for my LinkedIn profile and they are in my profile.

Hope it helps ;o)

Glenn

HI Julie,

I went through an extended search for vendors, focusing mostly on the ones mentioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I also looked at a few smaller LMS providers, but decided to go with an enterprise level SaaS model for the functionality I wanted. You can google Gartner and come up with a lot of resources that way. When I had it down to my top three (Cornerstone was really the second choice), I asked for demos, and then sent the RFPs and got pricing. Learn was far less expensive than the others and gave me extras in the negotiating process, so at that point, since it had the functionality I wanted, I had a decision. I knew that the training component with Learn was weak...and that proved to be true. I went with less expensive, though I felt Cornerstone was more the premiere product--just my opinion. I could not have gotten buy-in for as much as the other quotes would have cost us.

Side note: Since Learn became Taleo became Oracle, I have no idea about their pricing model, anymore.

Hope that is helpful.

Glenn