For our non-profit organization, at first Moodle seemed the obvious choice for e-learning classes we are working on. But since we’ve been working with WordPress for years, we are wondering if it would be more logical to use WordPress as an LMS?
There seems to be many interesting plugins to work with. We’ve got many multimedia elements to display and would like to implement interactive quiz like drag and drop, hotspots, etc.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
I’d also add Sensei onto the LMS list:
Built by Automattic, so it integrates with WordPress and WooCommerce seamlessly.
This has been on my radar, and woocommerce to handle registrations/sales but haven’t looked deeply into it
Whatever you do, dont use learndash. It’s a terrible mess that fails at the most basic tasks, have a ugly UI, it’s slow. Do yourself a favor and look at something else.
Sensei has really grown in functionality in the past year or so, I’d definitely give that a look.
+1 for Sensei - they have a new demo as well so you can try it out before you buy it: https://senseilms.com/
It depends a little on your experience and needs. WP has some strong LMS plugins - like Learndash and Memberpress courseware…
The good: They are easier to build courses with. They can charge for courses. You can do a lot with the same WP tools you use for pages etc. They are aimed at people who may not be ‘web builders’ - so are easier to learn to use.
But they are aimed at online and ‘entry level’ learning… they can deliver solid courses, but would struggle with stuff at higher college/uni level. Many will have quite basic offerings until you upgrade to what can easily become quite expensive packages.
Moodle is a much bigger fish - which can handle a ‘multi-department’, multi-tutor, hundreds+ of courses with a wider range of ‘useful widgets’ for building courses (question types, ways to store coursework, depth of profile info etc.). Moodle is alos a good ‘admin support’ for a college with physical (e.g. classroom) lessons not just online - And it’s all free if you have robust hosting for it.
But, it is very complex in the back-end, with thousands of options and a relatively opaque workflow. You really have to digest the documentation and you should have at least one person dedicated to learning/maintaining it.
At a guess, as a non-profit you’re not delivering at college/uni scales… in which case a WP LMS would be a solid option.
I work for a software company and we’re using learndash for customer learning + certs on our platform. Works well enough for us!
I am also trying to implement that for my company at the moment. Are you using a plug-in or something you built yourself?
The problem I have with the plug-ins I find rather appealing is that they require course - takers to create an account and log in. I want to keep the barrier as low as possible to learn. Any recommendations?