Forum Discussion
Which LMS do you use and why?
Hey all,
Just a quick question to you....what LMS do you use and why?
I use Moodle 2.1.2 currently. Why? It seemed like a good idea at the time! Now I'm frustrated with the SCORM reporting and interface.
Any thoughts?
-Dave
301 Replies
We have people that are doing some pretty cool things with Rise on the Travitor's LMS. They seem to compliment each other quite well and the design matches nicely.
You could also check TeamFluent - a SaaS based LMS, which unlike other traditional Learning Management Systems, helps teams improve business performance by building a culture of learning beyond just creating a dusty library of courses and lessons. Teamfluent stimulates and accelerates personal development and helps individuals and teams with modern learning tools such as social learning, micro learning and gamification. You can find out more here: https://www.teamfluent.com
You should take a look at Synapse LMS/LRS at http://www.maerix.com/en/synapse-training-knowledge-skills-management
XAPI and LTI compliant !
I work for a university that has us using Blackboard. Everyone on our IDS team knows how clunky and limited Blackboard is, but we are stuck with what we have.
I once heard it described as being like a trailer home whose owners, when the abode became outdated, built onto the existing structure rather building a new structure. Thus, there are hallways and stairways that appear to be useful but that lead to nowhere, and there is no fluidity of design.
It is a nightmare to change content in groups, for instance, as you have to make the changes separately for every single group. At times, this means making a single change to five or six different groups in multiple sections and the Master Template. Very inefficient!
We are trying to add Storyline to our design team tools, but so far we have been unable to get permission to turn on SCORM in our courses. We've put in the request... so maybe it is on the horizon?
We use Prosperity.
The main reasons are:
- It runs Articulate very well
- The Scorm transfer is smooth
- It adds functionality that Articulate does not have such as being able to send e-mails to students and others based on certain student behavior
- It allows us to combine Articulate Projects with other media and HTML5 material.
- It allows a glossary whereby the same glossary can be used for an entire course--set of Articulate Projects whereas in Articulate there is no current way make a glossary from on project available to another project..
- It allows a fair amount of programming to customize it for our needs
- It keeps excellent records and we can access the data base via API as well as use their standard reports
- The price & price structure is acceptable. All of the commercial LMS's we have seen use a pricing algorithm that is not really suited to our needs. We want to pay by the student hour or by the student course. We have courses from different organizations where some have a student charge and others are free and subsidized by a sponsor. Many of our users take one short Articulate Project and they are done. Others will be active for months. We need to pay for student use and nothing else. We find that for some reason the LMS prices are very high compared to other kinds of cloud services which are much more complicated and use much more computer and storage resources. Let's face it, when we can by a 2 TB hard drive for $60, the idea of paying $20 per TB per month is a little offputting.
I am waiting for Amazon to provide an LMS along with their other cloud services. They always charge for what you use.
Hey Lewis...thanks for your detailed response. Very appreciated. We are a start-up planning to create compliance required learning modules in the health care industry. We expect a large number of users whose organizations require employee certification. From my research, it seems that LMS hosting on our own site will be better than cloud based. The Prosperity features look good and I have an email in for a quote.
Are you saying that you do not use cloud-based, but host on your own server? We have a webmaster to set up the service but it needs to have an easy interface for managing courses after that.
Does the 'fair amount of programming (point 6) require IT knowledge or can the average Articulate module creator also customize the LMS interface?Does the 'functionality' of point 3 also require IT knowledge or is it intuitive for the average user?
Thanks so much
We have the exact same use case. Including the health care area.
We have been around the block with our own hosting and cloud based. Our conclusion was that the cost of maintenance of an in house LMS was too burdensome and time consuming.
But most of the cloud based systems do not have the flexibility to meet our needs. The few that do cost 5 and 6 figure licensing fees—except prosperity. The reason is that Prosperity creates a Separate Instance of their system for each client, so they can allow changes for one without messing up the rest.
Not only does prosperity allow you to add much of your own coding, but they will customize for you and their basic cost structure covers 20 hours of personal training and/or programming.
They will let you run your own instance on your own server, but this is a huge amount of work and only pays if you have very large volume.
My advice is to start with them (or someone else hosting) and when you have enough scale, then move it to your own servers.
We found that one MAJOR criterion of LMS systems depends on how you are developing courses. Our problem is that we do a lot of course development in Articulate Story Line, but we also have videos, text, PowerPoints and an occasional audio file. Not all the LMS systems integrate well with Articulate. Prosperity is pretty good in that respect.
