Need help with LMS decision....is Moodle that great?

Thank you all for sharing your insights and experiences. I especially appreciate hearing about what systems you have used that you have both loved working with and those who have been subpar.  There are sooo many options.   It has been really helpful as I have not had any luck in getting Moodle downloaded onto my MAC computer.  But everything I read is how many users Moodle has and how popular it is.  Based on what I am hearing, because I don't have IT background or support is leading to my confusion with how Moodle should work. 

To provide additional information about what my needs are for this project.  I am working closely with a large social media group who is looking to provide online courses in the related field both for free use as well as for purchase.  In addition we are looking to partner with a site that would also allow our group members to upload their own content for free use or purchase.  We don't currently have IT support, but if necesssary could explore that as an option.  This has the potential to have a very large amount of users taking courses as well as uploading. 

So the basic needs are these:

Commerce capbilities

User friendly both from administration, as well as end users

Customization

Community building options such as chat boards

Easy integration with multiple eLearning authoring software and

Preferably web based as users will from all over the world

If possible a structure that wouldn't require major IT support

I hope that gives a little bit better picture of what I am exploring.  I recognize my needs are a little different than those of a singular company or academic setting. 

Thanks again for all your great suggestions!

Sarah, about your requirements:

1 You can integrate Moodle with Paypal 

2 Once you've set up the site, adding or editing new content is rather easy (again great resources available)

3 Moodle themes are available (both free and paid), plus each course and activity page can display different blocks

4 It has chats and forums

5 It works with the most popular tools, plus you can create content within Moodle (I especially like block that displays definitions from the Glossary interaction - very useful)

6 Once you install it on a server, users just use their browsers

7 Honestly, you should have one person who knows IT stuff (there are many ebooks and community forum which can help him or her get to know Moodle administration and troubleshooting)

In the end, it all depends on your budget and IT skills.

Hope it helps

You can find exemplary Moodle blocks (which you can turn on or off on every course main page and activity page) here

Stafano, we don't know yet how many users, but based on the large number of active members could easily get into the thousands.  That is what makes this tricky, to begin with it may be a few hundred users or could begin much bigger with 5-10K +.    The choice has to be flexible to adapt to a potentially large amount of users. 

Sarah:

I suggest reaching out to superhero Phil Mayor about Moodle. I consider him an expert on it. --Daniel

Yes, I agree with Daniel!

Phil could really help!

But apart of the LMS choice, I'm afraid you definitely will need a partner.

You could give Totara moodle or Docebo a try! It's free and you can get confident on administering  courses and users.

Switching to stability, hosted and managed installations in server farms can free you from IT worries and performances concern...

I personally use a cutomized hosted Moodle installation (similar to Totara) clustered on 9 servers in 3 different italian cities, and this allows thousand of simultaneous users.

Yes, because it's matter of concurrent users and web requests... they could easiliy down your server, if IT infrastructure is not appropriately sized to allow multiple requests. ...

Not sure you need me here, moodle is a little quirky but as others have suggested when you get used to this it will do most of the things you want without having to do much work.

I would agree with Stefano you need a partner, especially if you want to run Totara.

Concurrent users is something that is difficult to calculate (the user needs to be accessing the database at the exact same time to be concurrent otherwise you could have 3,000 users logged in not doing anything with out having a problem on a single server (probably an exaggeration).

Moodle is Scalable and most good partners will ensure your service does not go down.

Like I say, not much to add here, there is plenty of documentation out there, the moodle site when you get to know it is full of stuff (it is built on moodle which i dont think was the best option for the site).

If your goal is to host it yourself then there is a slight learning curve to that. I remember when I first installed it without any prior knowledge it took me about two days and a few breaks to calm down when things didn't go as planned. I have found that the documentation for installing under all kinds of circumstances is easily available with a little searching.

To answer your questions about why it might be superior, I've just started blogging about that. You can see my first (and second) post about it here: http://mrjonsclasses.blogspot.com/2013/03/moodle-vs-insert-lms-part-i.html I'll likely have even more to say about it in the next few days as I have time to write. At this moment, I don't think there's anything out there that is even close. Not to mention, if you have any courses you'd like to start with you could always see if you can find one on MoodleShare.

Hope that helps,

Jon

@sarah

If you are planning on having active forums (assuming that's what you mean by chat boards) as crazy as it sounds, Moodle 2.4 still does not allow email subscriptions on one discussion within a forum. (You have to subscribe to the entire forum and thus users would get emails not necessarily related to their specific interests) There's talk about changing forums in 2.5 to a version created by Open University (ForumNG) which allows individual subscriptions per thread, but since you referred to creating a robust community, if you choose Moodle, I think you'd probably want to use something else for the forums part. I think there was one plugin that tried to make an adjustment to standard Moodle forums, but I never heard much about it. You could install the NG plugin from Open University, but they don't have one ready yet for Moodle 2.4. 

In your situation I think Stefano is right on with suggesting Docebo as one possibility if for no other reason you don't need IT to begin with, no upfront costs, and you don't have to worry about total users, but users actively accessing within the last month. The annual Totara license fee (not hosting) is based on number of users and there's a pretty big bump from 3,000 to above that number. 

Todd

I know you guys know you are amazing, but please let me reiterate....everyone is so amazing here!  Your insights shared here as well as in previous posts about LMS systems has been incredible helpful for me to hone into 4-5 options for us to further review.  We still have a lot to define as far as the specific of how we want the experience for user and administrator to flow which will help us as we vet through the different options. 

Based on your feedback, reading reviews, blogs, testing some of the software, talking with vendors I've come up with these 5 options to explore further based on our basic needs:

Moodle (w/partner) *Currently have calls out to different Moodle partners to better understand their approach and pricing.

Docebo

Absorb

Totara

Desire2Learn *need to confirm they support selling of courses

Since Moodle sparked this whole conversation.  Thank you for those who validated I wasn't crazy    With your comments combined with a long conversation with my little brother who is in the IT world, it all makes sense now why it didn't make sense initially.  I've decided that Moodle is like the Matrix...all of a sudden it becomes clear and you can see the code ;)

If you have additional insight please feel free to share, this is great information!

I'll be sure to follow up with this thread once we have spent more time vetting through to provide another point of insight. 

Thanks again everyone!!!