Online education
Do you have a specific set of skills or knowledge that you want to share but comments on YouTube video are not interactive enough for you? We hear you.
During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. many had to do the transition from face to face, classical education to online education. At that time, we already had 15 years long experience with LMS systems and 5 years on selfhosted teleconferencing system.
What is LMS anyway?
Just as CMS stands for Content Management System (web site making tool), LMS means Learning Management System. A tool for making online educations with tracking and evaluating your participant’s activities on it.
What LMS to use?
If you are new to the market, that is a hard question. The pandemic made a boom on the market with a lot of new systems using quite aggressive marketing to reach a share of the market.
This much marketing has created a fog in the search engines preventing you to find old and proven systems. We found a list of “the best LMS” with 25 years old, proven, fantastically documented, regularly updated, system with millions of users on 15th place.
But, if you scratch the surface you will see that all of the systems tools are services. Everything is on the servers of the company owning them. Furthermore, those systems are closed so you can not make any changes and fine tuning to them.
If you don’t have any custom requirements you can roll with a as-it-is systems but we recommend you to go for a selfhosted system. During your LMS system’s life you can reach a point when you need a new functionality. Open source system will allow you changing anything. On the other side you could find yourself doing hell of a job exporting all of your courses, data and users from one system to another if your non flexible, as-it-is system doesn't work for you anymore.
Service VS Product
Product has a price and once you buy it – it is yours. On the other side, services lend you a tool. There is a subscription plan you chose and fees you pay monthly or yearly. There is a steady trend over last ten years of companies migrating their products to services.
Services are mostly not a selfhosted systems.
Licensing differences
All the systems, being products or services range from an open source systems to the as-it-is systems you can not change or modify.
Open source systems are great platforms for making “your own system”. We have done it a couple of times already. When you have needs that no one have solved yet trough a publicly listed plugin you can use, you can use core of the open source system and add 5% of code you need to get the job done making “your custom” LMS.
Enter Moodle LMS
With everything said, we recommend Moodle LMS.
Our recommendation comes after 15 years of using it and 7 years of customizing the Moodle to our and our partners needs.
At the time we are writing this, Moodle reached version 4 and had over 2000 publicly listed plugins with over 1000 developers working on those to make your life easier.
Moodle LMS is open source and selfhosted system. Yes, you need a server to run it but if you do not expect a lot of concurrent users (number of users logging in your LMS at the same time) you can run it on a cheaper shared hosting server.
Have we said that Moodle is free? Well it is! You just download it, upload it to server, set your database, install it and you are good to go.
Does downloading from site, FTP uploading, database creation and installing sounds a bit too much for you? Just look for a hosting company that has C Panel and Softaculous on your desired hosting plan. With Softaculous you can just click on system you want to install, enter its name, database name, admin user name and password (do write down all of those 
) and system will download, setup and install everything for you.
) and system will download, setup and install everything for you.Benefits in function
First of all you have functionality you need. Being trough existing plugins or with making your own expansion. Moodle is not just opensource, it is made to be customized. It has structure ready for reading externally made expansions and tools. So, you can add whatever you need.
Benefits in security
Even if selfhosting sounds like lot of work, your data will be in your hands. Furthermore, Moodle keeps all of the data in special folder which Moodle uses but it can not be accessed via web publicly. This is a extra layer of securing your system's data.
Cost benefits
In the end, if you have special needs in functionality from your LMS, you can make one from scratch or customize existing platforms with licenses which allows it. The first solution would cost tens of thousands of euros, the second one thousands of euros. This is where zero make all the difference.
If you have any questions about LMS systems don’t hesitate to give us a buzz.
Author
Dr Nikola Ilic - MD and Biomedical informatics PhD