Thursday, May 05, 2005
Learning Management Systems
Until recently, I used to think that LMS or LCMS falls in the same category as other 3 letter acronyms like WCM, DMS, CMS, ECM etc. I had a need to evaluate learning management systems for our internal KM activities and I assumed it would be trivial to find a Content Management system that can be easily used for implementing a Learning Management System. I couldn't be more wrong. I tried a lot of CMSes (Mostly open source) but could not find anything that suited my needs. Major ones that I remember are:
OLMS lacked enough documentation and i had to do too much work to just get it up.
For Eledge, if you have a course that has large number of files (PPTs, Docs, pdfs etc), you will need to manually put links for all of them. Secondly, for every course one creates, one has to create a new database, new context etc. Basically it involves too many steps and cannot be used by business users. However, its really a cool product within these limitations.
I am still playing around with A-LMS. Haven't had success yet to have it up and running.
Finally, i chose moodle (http://www.moodle.org/), which i must admit is an excellent LMS.
I would have preferred a J2EE based solution though.
- OLMS (http://www.psych.utah.edu/learn/olms/)
- Automatic e-Learning LMS (http://sourceforge.net/projects/a-lms/)
- Eledge Open Learning Management System (http://sourceforge.net/projects/eledge)
- Couple of other PHP based (ATutor, Moodle etc)
OLMS lacked enough documentation and i had to do too much work to just get it up.
For Eledge, if you have a course that has large number of files (PPTs, Docs, pdfs etc), you will need to manually put links for all of them. Secondly, for every course one creates, one has to create a new database, new context etc. Basically it involves too many steps and cannot be used by business users. However, its really a cool product within these limitations.
I am still playing around with A-LMS. Haven't had success yet to have it up and running.
Finally, i chose moodle (http://www.moodle.org/), which i must admit is an excellent LMS.
I would have preferred a J2EE based solution though.
