LMS Suggestions from e-Heroes

May 08, 2012

Good afternoon e-Heroes!

I work at a credit union and we are currently using Cornerstone as our LMS, but we are looking at possibly moving away from that software. We have been introduced to Travitor and I was wondering if any of you are currently working with it. If so would you recommend it? Do you believe Cornerstone is a good LMS? Is there any other LMS that you would recommend for us to consider. Thank you for your time!

31 Replies
Bob S

Hello Hector,

I will follow Meg's lead and say don't use Taleo Learn.

They make a robust product, that's powerful and stable. But they are not good business partners at all. You are required to know EXACTLY what to ask for down the Nth detail as opposed to being able to layout a business problem or capability desire and have them present options.

Conversetly, I've had good experiences with Absorb (not cheap but worth it) and SkillPort (cheap and easy but limited).

Good luck,

Bob

Phil Mayor

Andre Kruger said:

If you invest time and effort into Moodle you can really get advanced courses, the student registration modules and course management tools are also not too bad, and of course it is Free! But I recommend that you at least have a PHP developer available and you have to choose a good hosting provider.


I agree, we use moodle. Moodle just looks a bit dated and it is hard work to make it not look like moodle.

the only really good examples I have seen have been done by kineo (love their macdonalds site

Steve Flowers

Are you looking for virtual classroom (facilitated) features or a launch, track, report? I've been looking at Instructure Canvas as an alternative to virtual classroom tools like Moodle, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn. It compares quite favorably. I enjoy using the demo and it does come in Open Source and Hosted flavors.

We've been using Inquisiq for around 10 years. It's relatively basic but does practically everything we need it to do (around 100K employees). This tool also comes in hosted and self-hosted flavors. Last I checked it was around $9K for a perpetual license (pay once, install on one box and pitch to as many users as you want). They have a demo you can try. It's not perfect, but I'd take simple, inexpensive, and usable over the behemoth demon LMS that masquerade as useful systems (have experience with most of the bigguns - they all provide very low value for the money).

Scorm Cloud offers an interesting service. It's based on number of enrollments, not number of learners. If you have lots of learners and a few courses spread across your population, this could work in your favor. The other advantage to Scorm Cloud, it's built to be an intermediary. Meaning, the folks at Rustici want to provide ways for you to free yourself from the LMS. I've seen Scorm Cloud integrations with Wordpress.

I've heard good things about Litmos. You might also try out Articulate's offering. I've seen some demos of this system and for its purpose, I think it looks pretty good.

Jasmine O'Connell

We're also in an LMS selection process right now. Our current LMS is Pathlore, which is no longer being updated. We're looking at Sum Total, Taleo, Saba, and Cornerstone. One of our sister hospitals uses Absorb, which they generally like but have found to be limited.

Why are you thinking about moving away from Cornerstone?

Hector Aldaco

Hi Jasmine,

The reason why we are looking to move away from Cornerstone is mostly due to the service.  We have reported issues in the past and it has taken up to a week to get the issue resolved.  For example our feed that goes through the system has been getting delayed.  So when we hire new employees, we have them work on courses in our LMS, but the feed has been taking a couple of days for the employees to appear as users, so our HR department has to manually be entering the new employees into the system, when the feed should be automatically creating those profiles.

Hector Aldaco

We are are looking for a hosted solution.  and from this conversation Plateau is out of the picture. We are considering resigning with Cornerstone, but we just want to see what other companies are using.  We use our LMS to track course completions, we create instructor led courses, we create tests within the LMS for our training curriculum (we do not use articulate for all of our testing).  we pull reports to be sure all employees complete courses. 

Gerry Wasiluk

Picking a LMS is such a heady and intense task, I''m always a little bit wary of recommendations in forums like this one. 

It tends to be anecdotal as opposed to a well-researched and thought-out process. What's good for one group may or may not fit another.

That's why I said the best choice is the one that best meets your requirements.  You need to examine all your requirements from your lead stakeholders and then choose the LMS that best meets them.

For example, being able to run AICC or SCORM content from Articulate is one requirement but not the only one most times.

For example, does the LMS need to interface with any other systems?  If so, which ones and how?  Or is it a completely stand-alone system all by itself, getting no data from any other system nor sending data to another?

With LMS's, what you don't know can hurt you bad down the line. The devil is in the details.

If you can afford it, I'd bring someone in (someone who is very knowledgeable with LMS's) who can help you refine your requirements and pick the LMS that best meets your organization's needs.

Angela Castiel

I agree with Gerry, but here's my two cents:  We use SumTotal via Adayana.   It's the only one I've used so I don't have any other LMS to compare it to.  I find it gets the job done and is very user friendly.  They have a pretty good reporting system that contains report templates as well as the ability for reporting customization.  Tests and Surveys can be created via QuestionMark within the LMS. 

Eric Nalian

We currently use Plateau/Succefactors - It is not the most perfect system, however when we were going through the selection process it met all of our needs for a price we were willing to pay, and the other ones we were looking at were either: too pricey, did not have the features we were looking for, or were not user friendly.

Cornerstone and Learn.com (Which is now Taleo) were our 2nd and 3rd choices.

Andre Kruger

Gerry Wasiluk said:

Picking a LMS is such a heady and intense task, I''m always a little bit wary of recommendations in forums like this one. 

It tends to be anecdotal as opposed to a well-researched and thought-out process. What's good for one group may or may not fit another.

That's why I said the best choice is the one that best meets your requirements.  You need to examine all your requirements from your lead stakeholders and then choose the LMS that best meets them.

For example, being able to run AICC or SCORM content from Articulate is one requirement but not the only one most times.

For example, does the LMS need to interface with any other systems?  If so, which ones and how?  Or is it a completely stand-alone system all by itself, getting no data from any other system nor sending data to another?

With LMS's, what you don't know can hurt you bad down the line. The devil is in the details.

If you can afford it, I'd bring someone in (someone who is very knowledgeable with LMS's) who can help you refine your requirements and pick the LMS that best meets your organization's needs.

This is the best advice Hector, start with your requirements, budgets available and then start looking at produts that suite these.
Chris Fletcher

I've just posted a similar question:

We're currently looking for an LMS for our company to use internally, but we don't want to spend too much money. We've looked at Moodle and Totara, and to be honest, I'm not overly happy with them.  What we're looking for needs to meet the following criteria:

  • 1000 users
  • Allows classroom/face to face training as well as eLearning (Articulate!)
  • Is a good value product (ie affordable)

Does anyone have any recommendations as to where we should look? Someone here suggested Joomla, so we're going to look at that, but are there others in that sort of price range?

Any help would be very gratefully received!

Chris

Gina Hoekstra

We have 3000+ users and use GreenLight by Silkroad. I like it from an Administrator Standpoint and even our novice computer users at our plant's can handle the program pretty easily. Not sure of the costs as I was not around during that phase, but They have a great customer service team as well.  The Admin side is neat and clean, easy to find what you need and organize your content.

Rebecca Hay

We too are in the process of selecting a new LMS. We ahve narrowed it down to two, Cornerstone and Saba. We are coming from NetDimensions EKP product. EKP is a good product, we just feel that we have outgrown some of the features (or lack thereof).

Hector, has Cornerstone been responsive when you've put in help tickets?

Is it possible that the problem with the delay in new hires is the way your import from your HR system is confirgured to run?

I get concerned when I hear about any delay in repsonsiveness. Good customer service is very high on our list of must haves.

Thanks

Jez Coates

Although new to Articulate, I have many years' experience in elearning, working predominately with Macromedia, then Adobe products. I have designed, built and developed many (albeit from the same basic platform) bespoke LMSs in Flash. The LMSs I have built incorporate many unique features, such as workflow options, certificate printing, line manager notifications, reporting, as well as classroom-based learner registrations etc.. This list goes on really!

The player/courses have all been designed and built within Flash. (Yes ... customisable to look exactly like the Articulate player.)

I look forward to using Articulate to streamline course development for an overseas charity I work with.

How can you help? Do you want to help? Well ... what do YOU want an LMS to do? What DOESN'T your current LMS do, that you think it should? I would like to open up to experts to have their input, so I can add as many features as required!

Currently, the LMS integrates into Active Directory, or as a standalone manual login system, linked to an SQL database.

I apologise if this is not the right place for this ... but waiting for a course to publish in Articulate takes a while ...

Patrick Ryan

Gina Hoekstra said:

We have 3000+ users and use GreenLight by Silkroad. I like it from an Administrator Standpoint and even our novice computer users at our plant's can handle the program pretty easily. Not sure of the costs as I was not around during that phase, but They have a great customer service team as well.  The Admin side is neat and clean, easy to find what you need and organize your content.


Gina, Have you loaded Storyline SCORM 1.2 HTML5 courses on GreenLight and tested them on an iPad using Safari?

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