(PS – Here are 9 that are free!)
I’m doing research for an article appearing in our Sept/Oct issues of Elearning! and Government Elearning! Magazines on low-cost LMS’s for those companies who are just getting started with learning management systems. I’m also doing a side bar to that article on free learning management systems. That list is below.
I’m looking for a more extensive list of low-cost LMS examples. Please send me your suggestions, and I’ll try to verify costs with each of the vendors.
• ATutor (http://atutor.ca/)
• Moodle (http://moodle.org/)
• Claroline (http://www.claroline.net/)
• Dokeos (http://www.dokeos.com/)
• TCExam (http://www.tcexam.org/)
• ILIAS (http://www.ilias.de/docu/)
• OLAT (http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/index.html)
• Sakai Project (http://sakaiproject.org/)
• EFront (http://www.efrontlearning.net/)
As always, thanks for sharing your ideas, comments, and suggestions. PS – if you’re going to our ELCE conference in Anaheim at the end of September, and the topic of acquiring a new LMS/TMS is of interest to you, please check out my pre-conference session on “How to Buy the Right Learning System.”
About the author of this article
Joe DiDonato is the Editor-at-Large for the Elearning! Magazine Group. Joe's background includes senior learning positions, including CTLO, CEO and board-level assignments. Joe is also the co-founder of The Orphan Foundation.
Contact Information: jdidonato@2Elearning.com; (888) 201-2841 x846.
To find out more about Joe, please click: Joe DiDonato's Full Biography. To follow on Twitter, please click: Twitter.com/jdidonato
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SkillSoft has a very inexpensive and powerful LMS that is often included with their web based courses.
Courtesy - Bronte Moran • Upside Learning has an inexpensive LMS but I do not have any experience. Bronte Moran, Practical Learning Solutions.
Courtesy - Tami Neuthal • Low cost is not "no cost". Moodle is extensively used in Higher education, K-12 and some business environments. It is a free, open source platform, needs some adjustments to the organizational comp. system, but is a great LMS!
Courtesy - Tim Chansy • Hi Joe - Here's link to Feathercap's pricing plans: http://www.feathercap.net/plans/
Not sure how you are defining "low-cost" for your article, however, I do think in many instances (especially for smaller and medium sized companies) the total cost of hosted LMS can provide long term cost savings. Anyway, good luck with the research and looking forward to seeing it.
Courtesy - Shawn Stiles • The cost of the system is only one of many considerations. How about rephreasing the question to ask; What LMS can do "this" for the least amount of investment, and then define the requirements that need to be met. This would give you not only a more co prehensile list but also one organized by capabilities.
To be sure (re: that cost is only one of many considerations). Several years ago, a team and I compiled a list of features found in the top 100 LMS systems on the market. Guess what the count was when it came to unique features? 3500 - and that was before mobile and social showed up.
Our yearly survey tends to group feature sets into categories, like mobile learning, eCommerce, and so forth. But the latitude within each of those categories is also pretty wide, if you think about it.
What I usually advise people to do is to begin with their own requirement set and create the specifications for their system from there. For instance, 44% of our readership said they have a customer-training charter. That will conjure up a list of functions that will be unique to their needs. Another set of internal-facing-only learning groups might need entirely different features, such as double-byte capabilities and local calendaring functions.
Truly price is only one small area - and can be "very misleading." It's only after a company knows what it needs, that they can begin to analyze price.
With that said and acknowledged, "What is a good low-cost, entry-level LMS that we can start with," is a common request to us at the magazine. Thus the writing task. You can believe that I'll be delving into these non-cost issues in the article.
Courtesy - Sherry Michaels (sherry.michaels@docntrain.com) • Hi:
We were disappointed with the field of 'low cost' LMS offerings. So we decided to build one. It should be ready in the late fall. If you want info for your article, you can contact me off list and I can give you some of the specifications. It will definitely be low costs, no contract, no cancellation fees and have a 30-day sandbox trial for it. So we've set policies in place and strict specifications to ensure it meets maximum 'low budget' needs. It will not have feature bloat. Having been familiar with software since my early days as a programmer, I was determined to thwart the 80/20 rule of software (out of all the features available, usually only 20% of the features are actually used). So this will be a SCORM compliant, zero-feature-bloat offering that also works with mobile device offerings (a huge requirement that LMS companies tout, but perform awkwardly). My email address is in my profile if you wish to get more info for your article.
Courtesy - Raul Zaritsky • Certainly one part of the 'cost' equation' is a consideration of staff that can install and open source LMS, such as Moodle; providing the needed customizations. My personal experience may be provide a minor data point on the staff time required. When I was an adjunct teaching Moodle, I was able to get up and effective system in about a week. Four years later, working in for another large project, our IT person was having difficulty getting Moodle up. He was however starting with no prior knowledge of LMS functioning. He went through various packages, templates and then settled on the use of SharePoint. But here again, not familiar with the usual tools after many months it was less than optimum. To see if I could help by providing a model, I tried an implementation on the pre-Lion Apple server I use. Working weekends it took me far to long to remember all the installation procedures, though my version had the need tools and proper navigation, it was not stable.
Lessons learned: a- IT staff without LMS experience as a user, teacher or course builder will create something that is far from what we know to be best pedagogical practices. b- Sadly also, more senior researchers with years of a Unix background, may likely have lost the facile skills needed to make the task worth their pay grade.
Both attempts can create, within your organization, and within your professional staff an initial impression that translates into poor adoption.
So the use of off site services which can build the initial LMS and then help you transfer it onto your server would seem a better path. Not that I am pushing Moodle, but in that world a company called Moodlerooms.com does provide the services we needed.
Did we finally use them? No, the IT staff had put in to much time on their SharePoint version that any adjustment was insulting. So we limp along with a sub-optimal system.
Courtesy - Sherry Michaels (sherry.michaels@docntrain.com) • @ Raul: We see similar stories 'out there.' Far too often L&D is either required to have IT skill or IT is required to truly understand the use and purpose of an LMS. The communications problems in between is exactly what we ran into.
So, we thought "What if it was hosted 'in the cloud' and just works?" "What if the extreme options weren't coded in?" "What if it does what it is supposed to do, doesn't take a degree in technology to use, and works with mobile devices?"
That led to our specs for a new, 'low cost' LMS. My constant mantra is: "It does not have to be that hard!!"
We haven't named it yet. Perhaps I'll put a contest out here. I'm looking for something like "It just works."
Courtesy - Kelly Meeker • I am not an LMS expert by any stretch! But some of the popular low-cost LMSs I've seen on the market are Litmos, LMLess and eCampus. All three are LMS Partners of ours at OpenSesame: http://www.opensesame.com/partners/Learning%20Management%20Systems
For more examples, you could consult Craig Weiss's director of LMSs and Learning portals here:
http://www.box.net/shared/u1liq5gkzp
His blog also provides excellent reviews of LMSs and content authoring tools:
http://elearninfo247.com/
Courtesy - Anja El Kabbout • Hi Joe,
I'm working with the open source LMS Moodle - and the 'how free is free' question really depends on the level of customization & the individual Moodle partner one chooses to employ to make it happen.
Moodle 'out of the box' really IS free, and the openly available training materials on the moodle.org site make it possible to educate yourself to use the system & create good courses without formal training (i.e. fees). Admitted, it takes a bit of tech-savvy and commitment to work through it on your own, but it's certainly possible.
If an organization wants to customize Moodle and/or add other talent management components, the costs involved vary largely from Moodle partner to Moodle partner. I've done so for my former employer, and the quotes I got differed largely. I ended up going with a small consultancy (Act2Win, Austrian moodle partner) to keep the development costs low.
Apart from the development costs however, the actual usage of the system is free - which was the winning argument for me to go with Moodle. The open source promise of 'no license / user seat costs ever' was a very compelling proposition & so far it's working great for us.
BR,
Anja
Great feedback Anja, and I've moved your comments over to the Elearning! Magazine blog so that readers could see them. There seems to be 3 paths appearing: The totally free route with the 9 free LMS's that I show on the blog site; An approach that involves a partner of one of these free LMS's; and Third, a low cost LMS - mostly SaaS/Cloud based - where a nominal charge per user seat is charged, and you adapt to the feature set of the product. We'll see if that holds as we approach the article deadline, but all of this has been very enlightening..
Courtesy - Richard Mundell • How about our totally FREE LMS that leverages Facebook (UdutuTeach and UdutuLearn)? It allows for the rapid creation of courses (using myUdutu), the distribution of your course to specific learners (leveraging FBs Grouping and authentication inherent in the network) and the tracking and reporting of courses; all at no cost. WIth thousands of users and courses on the platform, surely that should be on the list.
In addition, these same gadgets have been implemented as customized, fully hosted, private LMS instances that leverage the client's pre-existing network at minimal cost or time for set-up (in most cases a few days). The ongoing cost of your training is then directly related to the actual learning that takes place in a 'pay as you go' pricing model.
The principle behind both offerings is that it's FAR more effective to conduct training with your learners in a place where they already are.
Good luck with your research. Obviously, happy to answer any questions about the innovative stuff we are doing for many well-known clients.
Good stuff Richard. Is the appropriate URL link I should include in my list of free LMS software: http://www.udutu.com/? Also, I tried to click through to your pricing page and that link was broken. I was trying to understand the $1/screen/per month hosting charge for courses, so that I could accurately report on your great-looking product. And have you run into FB being blocked at some corporations like YouTube? You can send me information at jdidonato@2Elearning.com. Thanks again for letting us know, and I've moved your comments to our blog site so our readers can see your comments.
Courtesy - G. Todd Gladden, CWPP • I have used several LMS versions over the years, from home grown systems with BellSouth, to Large SumTotal/Docent types. I currently have a mid-sized company (less than 1000 users) and we use eLogic. The flexibility is pretty good and resonably priced. Accommodates eLearning, workshop/seminars and Instructor-led courses. Haven't seen any linkage with Virtual training, but imagine it culd handle it.
Richard Mundell • Hi Joe, Yes. http://www.udutu.com is our company site. I'm embarrassed to admit this and thankful that you pointed it out but the pricing link is broken and the information about the $1/page is obsolete due to changes in our pricing model made quite a while ago. We've wondered for a while how new contacts were seeing the older $1/page model as it's not on the company site, so thanks for identifying that. The smallest of details missed.....
To be clear, the authoring tool is completely free. Hosting of courses is inexpensive (as low as 20cents/screen/month), the Facebook LMS is totally free, and the private, hosted LMS (pay as go) model starts at $5/learner/course after implementation costs (as low as $3500).
So....any number of courses, of any length/size can be created and extracted by anyone at no cost.
Or, you might choose to have us host your course (without LMS functionality/tracking) for as little as 20cents/screen/month with unlimited access by unlimited learners.
Or, you may need an actual private, hosted LMS that can be totally free (Facebook model) or as little as $3500 to implement and $5 or less per learning credit**.
**(A learning credit is used when a learner accesses a new course for the first time only. Ongoing access to the same course has no additional cost. So, a course that has 500 learners actually access it will cost $2500 to deploy, host, track and report. If only 60 learners show up, it's $300. 150 learners, $750. Etc, etc.)
Re: Your question about Facebook LMS. We have a couple thousand users distributing a few thousand courses on FB. Most corporations have yet to embrace the idea of doing internal training on Facebook; which we understand, however, more and more are looking at the idea for various training needs; often as a parallel platform to their existing internal LMS.
The intent of the FB model is two fold:
1) It provides a free, powerful Social LMS for all those organizations and individuals willing to use it. It promotes the notion that anyone can teach and/or learn online with little or no cost or web expertise.
2) The technology employed to make it work demonstrates what allows us to leverage existing private networks the clients already have in place. The key being to "teach where your learners already are."
As we get further into it we are seeing all kinds of online learning opportunities via social network open up including those outside of the normal training and development focus. These include Customer facing training and "elearning as marketing" ideas that incorporate online learning as a key differentiation for building relationships and potential business/clients. All very exciting stuff!
Sorry for the lengthy pitch everyone but the general topic that you are pursuing of "Low-Cost LMS" and other solutions that remove the barriers to online learning is something very near and dear to our hearts!
Happy to clarify if any of this leaves any questions.
Richard
Joe, check out http://www.instancy.com as well, we have a very aggressive pricing model that can beat any free LMS as we do not overcharge on setup, support and customer service, if you are really looking at giving the secret out on why many training companies switch back from moodles then yes, suggest a company which is not open source but still has a pricing model which is very cost effective in the long run and ultimately comes out a lot cheaper then any free LMS
That’s interesting information
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I would suggest JoomlaLMS as an effective low cost lms solution. It has a wide range of features, high scalability and can be integrated to all kinds of Joomla-based components and plugins. You can find out more at http://www.joomlalms.com
Thank you for utilizing some time to write “Low Cost Learning Management
Systems, Learning Manangement | Elearning! Magazine BLOG” http://tcapps.info .
Many thanks once again ,Klaus
Hey very interesting blog!