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globusinfocomlimited · 2 years

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Best Learning Management Systems to look for in 2023

Learning management systems, or LMS, are learning platforms created to manage and track students’ learning. They are often used in corporate settings to deliver online courses and track learners’ progress.

There are many available options for LMS to choose from, and each possesses its own strengths and weaknesses. Below are discussed some brands to provide broader ideas to compare, analyze, and help you in choosing the best.

Absorb LMS

Offering a wide range of features, such as gamification, mobile friendliness, messaging, eCommerce capabilities, and a highly regarded user-friendly UI, allows Absorb LMS to stand out from the competition. Absorb LMS is not open-source and serves mid- to large-sized businesses.

The platform provides consumers with exceptional value overall, and the company regularly introduces new improvements.

Moodle LMS

One of the most popular LMSs in history is Moodle. Tens of millions of people in dozens of nations have used it, and it is open source. Moodle is a good option for colleges who have the required staff to manage their system.

You can configure Moodle practically any way you wish to fit your institution with the aid of specialised IT support.

Globus Infocom VC and LMS

With an industry experience of more than 20 years, Globus Infocom has mapped pioneering online learning solutions in the Indian education system. Making quality education accessible to one and all, Globus Infocom offers flexibility in learning from anywhere and anytime. Empowering teachers with the learning management system allow educators to keep track of learners, allow the creation of creative courses, and organize, conduct & execute instructional practices in a systemized manner.

Infrastructure Canvas LMS

One of the most often used software programmes for corporate education is the Canvas LMS. They are concentrating on stealing market share from well-known platforms like Blackboard and are making great progress in the educational industry. With its user-friendly platform, Canvas enables users and artists the flexibility to customise their online learning environment.

A free, open-source version of Canvas' platform is available. This requires more time to set up and costs more, just like other open-source alternatives.

Blackboard Learn LMS

Many of the best higher education institutions in the globe use Blackboard Learn, one of the most well-liked platforms. Its user interface and capabilities are well known to many educators and students.

The UI has been improved since the platform was recently updated. The learning curve for Blackboard is renowned for being high. Nevertheless, users are rewarded with a platform that provides administrators and educators with an extensive educational resource.

LMS Collaborator

A ready-made portal for educational requirements companies of all sizes is LMS Collaborator. For smooth interaction with your current software systems, they provide API integration.

Teachers can upload and store lesson plans in Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats. With the help of forums, group chats, and one-to-one texting, students can engage in high-level cooperation.

Bottom line

Today online learning in the classroom has become a common medium for teaching-learning practices. Studying at home in own comfort has become a new trend. Following this several new innovative solutions have been adopted to bring a change in educational patterns.

Above we have tried to provide broader ideas of different products/solutions offering enriched digital learning solutions like a virtual classroom with a Learning Management System providing broader accessibility to today’s learners.

#education #top eductaion #edtech solutions #online learning #online learning in the classroom #Learning Management System

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itechnicalshadowwalkers · 3 years

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APIs and Integrations

What are APIs?

Application Programming Interface, APIs are softwares that enables two applications to communicate with each other. It is done by connecting a website or an application with databases. APIs also allows third party developers to access databases from other applications.

General pros and cons of using APIs

Pros:

- Very efficient. Since it generates all information automatically from the database.

- Allows developers to easily embed content from other sites and applications into their project

Cons:

- API programming requires extensive programming knowledge.

- API implementation can be costly.

How could an API be beneficial for our project?

For our project, using the Fontys API can make our application very easy to use since it will use Fontys log-in information. This will allow the students to download the application and use it without having the need to create a new account. As well as for us the developers we can access all the information needed, and this will save us time and effort when developing.

Integrations. How can we integrate our project into Microsoft teams or Canvas?

First things first, before integrating any application there are a lot of things to consider. As for integrating into Microsoft Teams. They have a webpage explaining in detail about all the prerequisites.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/samples/integrating-web-apps

As for canvas integration, there is a video explaining LMS Canvas integration in detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvspNXhBXNk&ab_channel=CengageLearning

How would integrating our project into MS Teams or Canvas be beneficial to the users or developers?

By integrating our project into Microsoft Teams or Canvas it will benefit our users and improve on our project’s user friendliness drastically. Since Fontys students are already familiar with both Microsoft Teams and Canvas, integrating our project into any of those two applications means student will not have to download any additional applications or launcher to use our application. This reduces the chances of errors as well as confusion from the student’s side. So, by integrating our project we intended to make the customer journey of our users easier and more familiar.

#shadowwalkersaflah

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thesnhuup · 7 years

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In Defense of the LMS

Originally published on wcetfrontiers.org.

Ah, the much-maligned Learning Management System (LMS), the technology we collectively love to hate. It’s often bulky, either feature-bloated or feature-wanting, and has been created seemingly without hiring any user experience designers. For years we’ve been wanting to get rid of it. No one actually likes it. We put up with it. We collectively sigh and move along with our day.

Instead, we propose innovative solutions beyond the LMS—a future learner-centered technology ecosystem that lies just beyond reach wherein we extend a non-LMS platform through rich interoperability. We dream of deploying best-in-class integrated solutions for all of our learning and teaching needs—from basic assignment and assessment management to social interactions, content curation environments, adaptive learning, Competency-Based Education (CBE) systems and Learning Object Repositories (LOR.) This idealized future has not been largely adopted in higher education, and for good reasons, which we’ll explore later.

Maybe, instead of hating on this category of technology of admittedly legacy origin, we might try to evolve our ecosystems more practically, both within and beyond the LMS. This defense of the LMS is a proposal for a pragmatic path forward.

Realizing the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE)

The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) vision proposed by Malcolm Brown, Joanne Dehoney, and Nancy Millichap has been the point of reference for most conversations surrounding this improved, learner-centered technology-enabled future. Other versions of this concept have also been proposed. This concept is based on five domains: interoperability and integration, personalization, analytics, advising and learning assessment, collaboration, and accessibility and universal design. These are really good domains. The NGDLE is a solid and innovative framework from which to view a future, more dynamic learning ecosystem.

Many groups have worked to bring this future closer to reality, like EDUCAUSE through thought leadership, IMS Global through the creation of open interoperability standards, WCET by facilitating the conversation, among others. There have been innovative projects like TEx from the University of Texas System, focusing on a user-centered mobile-based experience, the app store at the University of North Carolina campuses, and systems designed exclusively for CBE like Brainstorm by Ellucian (now closed), Sagence Learning and Fidelis’s LRM solution.

There have even arguably been some success stories regarding a post-LMS world. Western Governors University, for example, has eschewed the LMS in favor of an extended Salesforce platform and usage of curated courseware. However, these examples have still been largely isolated in the marketplace, and have not gained significant traction. It remains that most colleges and universities prefer, at least for the moment, to stick with a traditional LMS. It may be cost, it may be the challenge of overcoming inertia and a feeling of LMS-related powerlessness, it may be lack of internal development capacity.

It may be a lot of things, but the practical fact remains—

most colleges and universities utilize LMSs and

most folks who work with them are not particularly enthusiastic about them.

And Another Thing We Learned from MOOCs

One of the things we learned from MOOCs has been that consumer-grade technology can be utilized for learning at scale, for relatively low cost. Even more importantly it can make the learner-as-user experience significantly less painful. The technology should fade into the background. It should support a seamless learning experience wherein the learner takes center stage. Despite the trough of disillusionment that MOOCs are currently experiencing, the fact remains that they are here, they are massive, and learners are voluntarily engaging with them, despite having little skin in the game. The large MOOC engines did hire user experience designers (they arguably should have also hired more instructional designers; a MOOC I am currently taking has immeasurable objectives like “understand”).

Why was this possible? They were freed from the assumptions of legacy systems, and, apart from the cMOOCs (“the originals”) they were largely developed by non-learning specialists who were able to look at the learning environment differently. This is one of the many disruptions of MOOCs, the fallout of which has not yet been fully realized.

Practically Speaking: The Reality on the Ground

Why is there this dissonance between what we in edtech largely agreed was needed decades ago and what has been realized in colleges and universities? Part of this dissonance is a cultural conversation. Engaging in large-scale system changes that involve students and faculty is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Many institutions do not have adequate funding to cover the cost of simultaneously running two systems while weaning themselves off of the previous one. Most LMS moves in the past five years have been precipitated by the deprecation of other LMSs like Angel and eCollege. At least a few of these changes have been affected by statewide discounts on specific LMSs or other variables like membership in Unizin.

In many cases, the discussions surrounding the NGDLE underestimate the power of status quo in LMS usage patterns. In institutions where the LMS is an add-on to supplement on-ground courses, or wherein online programs have cropped up on an ad hoc basis, it is hard to make the cultural argument for the rest of the institution that the disruption is worth it. Most online courses and programs are still instructor designed and developed; a one-to-many model is not the norm. And in cases where there is a strong online division within a larger institution, there is still the powerful fear of “first, do no harm,” with the perception of opportunity cost for student success being larger than reality.

So what are we to do?

Pragmatically Speaking: Proposing a Middle Ground for Realizing the NGDLE

I propose that institutions should evolve the LMS from within. As we undergo such an endeavor, it will be paramount to acknowledge that we are not the users. Learners are the primary users. Faculty are secondary users. And the rest of us should support. Often we have no idea what the user experience really is because we don’t test it, or we don’t ask good enough survey questions to get any actionable data that goes beyond surface inquiries. If we do get actionable data, it is rare that action is actually taken. This proposed pragmatic approach relies upon a consistent focus on the learner-as-user.

There are various functional groupings that are present in the learner-experience first. I will not address here the invisible systems that support the student experience. Within the learning experience itself there are categories like gradebook management, assignment submission, testing and quizzing, Content Management Systems (CMS,) or preferably Learning Object Repositories (LORs), and content authoring tools. Social engagement tools are needed, as are content curation and collaboration spaces. Outside of the immediate learning environment there are needs such as advising support systems and apps, enrollment activities and bookstore purchasing and provisioning.

All of these functional groupings can be plotted in reference to whether the LMS has those native features or whether the system would need to be extended to support them, and whether the LMS supports that functional grouping in a shallow or deep way. Institutional needs will vary on both spectrums, and conceptualizing of building the NGDLE on an LMS in this way is practical; it has the added benefit of being able to get a better learning environment to learners sooner.

Institutions would then be able to both evaluate LMSs, or other systems, with their needs in mind. If there are functional groupings that a given institution knows they want to use in a deep capacity, that institution may want to look for an LMS that has more of that functionality native to the system in a deeper manner. Likewise if there is lightweight usage, having that feature as a native functionality is a bonus because it is then not necessary to extend it. For needs that may be deeper, and which the LMS does not support natively well, that is where the system would intentionally be extended, preferably through standards-based, plug-and-play integrations, but also through more custom APIs if necessary (quantity and quality of data being both necessary.) Institutions should then avoid like the plague extending their LMS to get shallow functionality, particularly that which is rarely used.

Some institutions still largely utilize their LMS as a document repository and for grades; for online courses this usage expands to the deathly hallows of the discussion boards, for assignment submission and for formative and in some cases summative objective assessments. This relatively shallow usage does not dictate a robust ecosystem, rather it requires a more user-friendly experience. This is a more culturally and fiscally pragmatic approach with which to analyze appropriate systems.

The Future: LMS as a Platform

But we still want to get to our ultimate goal—a highly interoperable ecosystem with a best-in-class, learner-as-user experience. Given our current, collective limitations, what are we to do? Instead of searching out alternative platforms, we might partner with LMSs to reconceptualize the LMS as a platform. In many ways, the LMS is already beginning to evolve in this direction. Canvas has their App Store, which is a more individual faculty-driven model. John Baker of D2L recently utilized the oft-referenced Lego analogy. LMSs in general are moving away from individual building blocks or custom integrations towards open standards like LTI, but the robustness of that interoperability is still inconsistent across what version of LTI their product meets. LMSs are integrating more seamless synchronous video functionality – both Canvas and Brightspace have synchronous tools built on Big Blue Button.

An LMS will never out-Twitter Twitter, or out-Facebook Facebook, or indeed even come close to a functional version of those types of social platforms. And they shouldn’t try to. Rather we should work towards interoperability—even of these consumer tools—and do our level best (and more) to respect student data privacy. Putting the selection of input streams and publishing streams into the hands of learners will facilitate the robust nature of the learner-as-user experience. It will also embed within the educational experience the expectation of a partnership between learning institution and learner, enabling a relationship that will persist beyond graduation and alumni activities as we move to a world where continual education is necessary.

This is just the beginning of that evolution. No one likes the walled garden, but there’s not a plausible open playground yet. For many, if not most learners, we need to Chipotle the LMS. We need a core product with flavor options selected by the institution, the faculty or the learner, dependent on institutional model, in an easy-to-use format. (This analogy ignores the recent food contamination issues, though in some cases that might actually be an appropriate analogy in and of itself.)

What Can You Do to Help

Standards, standards, standards. Though Caliper, an open standard for measuring learning activity through IMS Global, was released a year and a half ago, there has been limited adoption, most of which can be attributed to the chicken or egg scenario. Those of us who work at higher education institutions need to be the incubators. We need to stand collectively together and, with loud and insistent voices, demand that learning resource vendors and tool providers adhere to more complex standards. We need to ask the same thing of our LMSs. We need to collectively spend our money to make that happen. RFPs need to require adherence to open standards, and the most recent versions of those standards. With purchasing power we can accelerate the development of interoperability.

This interoperability is the critical piece of the NGDLE puzzle. But each institution, depending upon their models for online education, need to evaluate both LMSs and extensible products based on their particular needs and culture. Adoption depends upon culture.

Our options are to either evolve what we have or continue to wait on a future that has not materialized in the years since it was conceptualized. And we can evolve, intentionally, now. An evolution, without the blood of a revolution, can have revolutionary effects for learners. Let’s put our money on that.

Originally published on wcetfrontiers.org.

from Academically Speaking http://ift.tt/2ggAk1d via IFTTT

#Academically Speaking #SNHUblogs

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createlms02-blog · 7 years

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Why is Create LMS

Why is Create LMS the Best LMS for Membership Organizations?

As a membership organization, you exist to train people and to share wisdom and best practice. You may run training events, annual conferences and networking meetings. And the really active ones have localized get-togethers and networking events - they canvas politicians for the better good of the membership and drive forward innovation.

One of the big problems that your membership organization may have is tracking your continuous professional development. Accountancy organizations for example, are plagued by constant change and the evolution of standards and rules.

• How do you know Fred is actually up to date with all of his latest training?

• How do you know that it's all current?

• Then how do you get training out to those people?

• What about the time Fred invests in self development, shouldn't this be recognised?

So as things emerge and things change, delivering that content, tracking that content, making sure people are in and taking it, is really important.

Integrations

The other thing we're seeing with membership organizations is that they generally have quite poor I.T. infrastructure and systems, many lack integration of their key systems and processes and workflows can be time consuming and manual.

They often have tons of spreadsheets, here, there and everywhere and are trying to manage many tasks from CPD to membership renewals from aging, custom made platforms. Add to this that membership organisations have to streamline office staff to keep membership costs down or in some organisations it is the members running the organisation with their own donation of time.

Track adherence and compliance

Because training requires gathering information like name, e-mail address and other information, it makes sense that those records flow out elsewhere. The Create LMS platform can be used to track adherence and compliance, so you can see the whole picture of the membership organization - even for new potential members.

So for example, let's say for an accountancy membership organisation, as a new course comes up, someone can create a course very quickly and post that link to their website. Someone who is maybe not even a member, but interested in the training, can click on that course and then immediately come into the learning management system. Then it's completely possible that the learning management system sends all of that data back to the CRM system, which then in turn keeps track of the membership.

Drive membership renewals

As we evolve our membership offering, we're starting to find membership organizations say all this training, adherence, compliance data and contact information just makes perfect sense that we drive membership renewals straight from the learning management system.

As we build our membership client base, Create LMS will become more like a CRM system. Because we can integrate with accounting systems like Sage Pay, Strike or other payment gateways, it is possible for us to make the whole process completely friction free.

Someone who's vaguely interested in a topic, maybe just taking a taster class, is brought in to consider if they have thought about the value of joining and becoming a member. This goes right the way through to the sales process and then on to continuous marketing, where their continuous professional development is tracked.

Continuous professional development

Imagine that someone is a member. They are taking the training classes and other classes can be made available. As the person is spending time earning credits, let's say reading, they can log that within our system. Then using the continuous professional development panel, they can upload saying they spent ten hours reading and therefore self-certify themselves at that point.

That can then notify an instructor to make a check-in with the person. And because our LMS has instructor workrooms, it is completely feasible for the membership body that people can run all the continuous professional development and the organization can test and validate that the work's actually been done.

Coaching and mentoring

With our coaching and mentoring module, people can buy higher degrees of membership where they get one-on-one coaching. It could be that the accountancy association has a gold level of service that provides access to the brightest and sharpest minds within the organization.

Let's say you pay an extra membership level to gain access to one hour of coaching. Imagine that all being tracked beautifully within one system. So you're not only tracking the courses people take in the real world, in elearning and in the blended learning classes, now all of a sudden you're managing all of the different types of training.

You're not only selling training, taking your IP and creating elearning available for all of your people, you're also gathering all the membership details, so you're able to make sales.

In the coaching and mentoring module, it's possible for you to have that value added area where all of the activities you're going to do between now and next month are also tracked. These are things that would be completely new to membership organisations, but very easy to set up and to be administered using our LMS platform.

Create LMS can build a membership organisation's courses, turning their IP into things they can sell and we can help with that process. Where they've already got training content ready, they just push it into the LMS platform and start selling it.

White label your LMS platform

We can also let you clone your platform. You can create a master academy that's completely white-labelled and they can sell that to their corporate member clients. For example, they can resell ready made portals and earn thirty percent of that.

So they can say, please can you set up a portal for a learning management system that's got all of our content in it, but can you please set that up for 'Billy Bob Accountants', or another company, and it will have all of the content sitting within it.

If desired, we can take some of that data and push it to the master backup in the master portal, so people can oversee what's happening in all the sub-portals. Now there are data privacy concerns that would need to be looked at, as some people would be fine with it and others wouldn't, but there are many ways that we can offer the portal.

Create LMS provides a really cool way where membership organizations can let individual members come into their academy and corporate members can take a corporate LMS with all of the content in it and track all of the training for all of their staff. Then the membership data, where relevant, reappears back in the master panel.

Conferences and events

We can help membership organizations monetize their IP, making it really easy for them to do all of their training and run all their conferences. So if you can imagine an annual conference, you've got lots of training events going on. You can organize all of those events that take place and you can create those classes. Then you can invite people to join. So those that can't attend the conference, perhaps because of cost or time, could actually attend the classes.

Wouldn't it be great if there were say, three learning sessions for your membership at your conference that members wanted to attend but couldn't - they could join as blended sessions and through video and web meeting.

For more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at unique learning system, scorm cloud,tin can api, learning management systems&learning management syste

#unique learning system #scorm cloud #tin can api #learning management systems #learning management system

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