Earlier this week, I saw a tweet from Bryan Alexander about helping a buddy choose an LMS. This was quite fortuitous because I spent a big portion of my day researching LMSs, as well as reflecting on my own experiences.

And, that’s what prompted me to write the blog entry, Choosing a Learning Management System. It also got me looking at different WordPress LMS PlugIns as a simpler alternative to the Moodle “everything but the kitchen sink” LMS solution. 

Comparison Chart

With that in mind, and at a colleague’s behest, I put this chart together. Not every solution I looked at, considered, and discarded appears on this list. I am grateful to Jason Neiffer for pointing out LearnDash.com, which has some nice features! But back to Bryan Alexander’s tweet. He shared:

My response was:

All that, I also put together a chart. It may be wrong, but that’s the point of sharing something. I seek correction, just be kind. It’s in a “anyone can edit” Google Doc. (here’s the free open source alternative version for those who may not like Google’s evil empire ) Feel free to update and improve it (as opposed to update it and destroy it).

🙂

My Reminiscing

This was an aside comment but it got so long, I decided to tack it on to the end of this blog entry.

Aside: In case you missed it,
I administered 12-13 instances of Moodle for a 56K student, urban
school district in Texas. I’ve also administered two WordPress instances
and got into phpMyAdmin to mess around with MySQL innards. Yeah, I did
Moodle stuff via the command line remotely on a $16K server in my
district…not sure how I got them to buy it, but hey, 13 instances is
powerful amount of service. I also had bash scripts to make backups, run
CRON jobs, etc. I was in my 30s, and energy was a boundless well to
draw upon.

Then, Moodle
1.9 was upgraded to Moodle 2.0, I switched to a job with more
responsibility, and my expertise went to heck. I switched to being a
Director of Technology with less time on my hands, and lost a bit of my
technical prowess. It got so bad, I ended up calling on an old friend to
bail out a business client.  I was totally embarrassed and felt
horrible. I’ve never told this story before, but abject humiliation will
do that to you. 

I did not respond well
to my failure, but I had a new job in a different space that demanded my
complete attention. Success in a new line of work is one effective
salve for failure.

Before that salve took full effect, I made a
firm decision to not be a Moodle Admin for hire any longer. Then, roll
forward to now, Moodle has evolved, I have access to technical support,
and I’m pondering what LMS is the right one to use for the myriad online
courses I support. Really, the right one to switch to, moving away from
a proprietary LMS.