Top Learning Management Software in 2021 | Techimply

Proprietary LMS

A proprietary LMS is a closed source platform that is sold and maintained by a vendor. These systems are often more expensive than the closed source ones due to the licensing fees that have to be paid by the user in addition to annual and ongoing fees related to the subscription. Proprietary LMS is hosted by vendors on the servers and they stay responsible for managing and maintaining the platform on the user side. They even offer the benefit of strong external support with regards to the tech support if anything goes wrong. Though this is done at an additional cost. The downside of such proprietary LMS is limited customization and integrations and even the security and stability rests in the vendor’s hand. 

Open-source LMS

An open-source LMS is a free version that does not require any licensing fee. Also, such can be maintained and customized by the user. When compared to the proprietary products, the open-source software allows a greater level of accessibility and control. Users can personalize the system to suit their needs by adding plugins and new functionalities for free. The caution here is the organization must have the infrastructure to run and support the software as well as an IT team or IT person who is familiar with the software. Even for the open-source LMS many of the managed service providers exist. As there are no hard costs with open source LMS, the companies still find themselves spending as much as the proprietary LMS for implementing and managing the open-source system. 

Course creation and management 

Users can create and manage the structured learning content and also set user permissions for controlling the students’ access to the content. Using an LMS, the users can add a variety of media including images, texts, videos, links, slideshows, interactive tests, assignment submissions, and many more to enhance the syllabus of students. Teachers can upload whole courses and modules, enroll students for the same or enable the self-enrollment feature, and even view the individual reports of the students. All the learning material can be uploaded all at once which allows students to follow along with content for the content’s length synchronously or asynchronously. 

Course calendars

Users can set all the upcoming updates of the course activities on the calendar for the students’ access. This allows the students to stay updated with the dates of all the assignments and upcoming tests. Also, they can view all the real-time updates when the user changes the due dates or exam dates. 

Online assessment 

The users can create and customize the tests for students and the students can access and submit them online at the decided time. Most of the platforms support various types of question papers such as drag and drop, multiple-choice questions, essay, agreement scale, true or false, and many more. From here the users can also grade the assignments or exams and post the scores online for the students to view. Additionally, the in-person assignments can also be uploaded online and graded using LMS. 

Attendance management

Some of the LMS platforms also allow the instructors to take and track the attendance of students for every class or even and can view whether a particular student was present or absent. Such prepared attendance reports can be uploaded online and on the other side, the students can view where they stand in the class. 

Discussion boards

The users and students can create the discussion boards for specific topics for the purpose of completing specific assignments, in-class discussions, or collecting the end-of-semester feedback. Students can even respond to the individual threads and edit the comments before final submission. Users can even set time limits on the discussion access that creates a compulsion for students to respond within a given timeframe. Also, all the completed discussions will be timestamped. Discussion boards provide teachers or users with a more useful tool to assess the overall student competency for a particular subject. 

Gamification

Certain types of LMS even contain the feature of gaming and a few of its elements that may include badges and leaderboards. The gamified environment is designed to have an engaging learning experience for the students and also it promotes social learning. Along with tracking grades, the students stay encouraged to work towards acquiring different pieces of digital approval directly in the system. 

Teacher communication

The users can send personalized or customized messages to students directly within LMS or through an email feature that usually integrates with LMS. This opens doors for one-to-one discussions among teachers and students regarding the student performance or further discussion of the class topics. Teachers can even set reminders and notifications for sending alerts to students for the upcoming deadlines whenever they access the LMS. 

Dashboards

The dashboards allow users to organize all the relevant information and keep it clean and organized for viewing and tracking specific data. All these interfaces can be customized to meet the user requirements and could include the data such as student attendance, average class grade, assignment submission statistics, student access time, and many more. 

Reporting 

All the LMS products contain different types of reporting features. All such reports are prebuilt or customizable. The prebuilt option provides users with only a limited number of offerings that already exist. Such reporting features include the reports for learner progress, participation, access time, quizzes, course activity, and many more. 

Student profiles

Students can create and manage their user profile within LMS that helps to build social relationships with the classmates at the time of discussion and also help the users to recognize the students more easily. All such profiles also contain the contact information if the classmates or teachers need to reach out to the student. 

The LMS provides a centralized repository for the digital content, allowing students and users to access and manage all the required course material in a single place from any device. Such tools allow automation of the assessment process and track the student’s progress while facilitating collaboration and communication among the students, teachers, and parents. 

Consolidate digital content

The primary reason for using the LMS is a real-time repository for all the digital learning content that the organization offers. It allows the teachers to create and share presentations, upload the documents, and share all the course material directly through the online application. 

Assess student progress

The users can track student progress after uploading the grades and assignment scores in the LMS. The LMS provides them a single place where one can create, distribute and grade the assignments and assessments for their courses. Most of the platforms include automatic grading features that allow users to mark student’s work and input scores directly into the grade book. 

Distribute content

Users can create new content and upload it or even upload the existing content as required within the application. This allows students immediately to view exactly what they need to study without waiting for the next class session. 

Facilitate communication

Typically, the LMS platforms come with standard communication features allowing instructors to send messages to parents or students or vice versa. The users communicate the information about upcoming assignments to the whole class or also they can message an individual student regarding his/her submission regarding their progress or concerns. The mass notification feature allows the user to get in touch with all the members of the class with a single click. 

Encourage collaboration

An LMS helps to create a digital community that nurtures meaningful collaboration among the users, both students, and teachers. The users use an LMS to share the unit plans, syllabus, and materials, inform colleagues about the instructional strategies they wish to try or ask a common question to the community. On the other side, students use the discussion forums built into the LMS platforms to join the online discussions, work together on group works, or submit the assignment. Learning is a social process and hence encouraging collaboration is a must to lead a richer learning experience for the students and improve their retention rates. 

Both types of software have their challenges but compared to the open-source LMS, a proprietary LMS come with several challenges:

Integrations

The LMS platforms often come with integrations with a variety of other education software allowing users to have improved communication and sharing of data. Particularly when you use a proprietary LMS, you may feel a lack of supported integrations with other tools that can be frustrating. Taking stock of all the products in the existing tech prior to the purchase can help to identify the LMS products that allow integration with many other tools. The vendors also charge for the additional integrations sometimes. 

Data migration

It is significantly difficult to move from a proprietary LMS to any other LMS product due to the exclusive hosting of the vendor’s platform. It becomes difficult for the users to migrate the data successfully from one system to another or from one proprietary LMS to another proprietary LMS. 

Security and stability

A proprietary LMS vendor takes full ownership of the security and stability of hosting the product or platform. Hence the users stay at the mercy of vendors to keep the servers operational always and to ensure that data breach does not occur. If a proprietary LMS platform suddenly goes down or shuts, the users would have to do a little recourse to retrieve all the data safely and successfully. 

Scalability

The proprietary LMS platforms charge more per user and it is also chargeable to add new users with passing time. One also incurs additional registration and maintenance charges. The open-source LMS is generally free and allows smooth scrambling up to thousands of users.  

It is important to follow some points while selecting a learning management software. Keep reading to understand the same. 

Choose selection team

The decision-makers need to involve the subject matter experts from all different fields to make a proper selection of the team. This mainly involves the dean, the principal as well as the number of teachers who represent most of the faculty needs. The IT department must also be present especially if you are going to work with an open-source LMS. 

Negotiation

Negotiation is mainly carried out between the buyer and the shortlisted vendors. In many cases, there is competition between two sellers selling the same software, at this point one must accept the deal-breaker price of the software that can be based on the discounts offered by each vendor. The buyers should consider the upfront costs, per-user costs, and other costs such as content hosting costs with LMS.

Either you have a small business with fewer activities or have a huge business with complex activities, learning management software can work for all. Any type of software will surely fit your business unit depending on the requirement of features in the unit. 

You can also opt for customized software if you have the requirements of specific features as per the working of your business. Certain features incur higher costs, and as a result, they are not found in ready-to-use software, that requires you to choose the specific software of your choice.