Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to episode five of the main course podcast. So this podcast is a little bit different today. I've been creating an online course, a course creation masterclass recently, which will be launched very soon for course creators out in the universe. And this podcast, in particular, is actually taken from one of the lessons in the course. It's all about learning management systems and course creation software. So if you're ready to start creating your online course or you're thinking about creating an online course, one of the things you'll need to consider is how you will host your course. And that's usually via a platform or a learning management system. So strap yourself in, get ready for this audio on learning management systems and platforms. I know that probably doesn't sound exciting, but I try and make it as exciting as possible. I really do give a whole heap of tips and tricks in this episode, and I focus on some very specific platforms, including Moodle, Teachable, Podia, LearnDash, and lots of others as well. So if you're looking for a platform or a learning management system for your course, check out this podcast because you might just find the answers. So listen up and enjoy. And also, if you wish to see the visual side of this episode, you can jump onto the main course on YouTube, check out episode five. It's the same audio, but it will have a lot of visual aspects that you can check out in the video. Alrighty, good luck. Enjoy. Okay, welcome everyone to this lesson on learning management systems and platforms. So what is an LMS? It's probably a term that you may or may not be familiar with, but it is one that you will need to learn if you are going to be building online courses and or working in this industry. So let's get started. Alright, so the main objective of an LMS is to host and track online learning. They provide a virtual hub where learners can access training resources. An LMS aims to make training accessible for remote learners and provide a central location for training across an institution or organization. So what does this actually mean in real life? So an LMS is a house for your courses and most courses that you build will need to live in a house. They are like the fancy furniture that you put into a house basically. And a course will not be able to run or nobody will be able to take a course unless it is hosted in some form of LMS. Now, some clients come to me and they say, I want to build a course. And I say, okay, do you have an LMS? And they're like, what is that? So I have to go through the process the majority of the time of explaining what an LMS is to some clients and customers. And so I just want to make you aware of what it actually is so that if you come across LMSs in your world or you potentially have clients who want courses built that you can have this conversation about LMSs. So they host the course and they also track online learning. So your course or a course sits inside the LMS and your students can jump on to the course in their own profile. They can access the training and then whoever has the administration rights or the godlike rules of being able to get into the backend of the LMS can also see the tracking of those students learning. And the students can also see where they are tracking in their learning. One of the good things about an LMS is when a student is accessing their course, they can go ahead, do the course, la la la, do some quizzes and then they can exit the course. When they jump back into the course after they've exited, say they needed to jump to the bathroom or have a few days off, the course will be saved in the last position that they were in. That is one of the bonuses of an LMS. LMSs also offer wonderful things like reporting. So many large organizations or I would say most large organizations like banks, government, things like that, they all have their own LMS system where their learners or their staff are onboarded onto the LMS system. They have profiles and the staff, the participants, have specific courses assigned to them which they need to do in order to undertake their job. If you're not in a large organization or if you don't have staff, an LMS is also a great way to host a course for people who are buying your course. So I will jump to platforms in a second which is the term that most people are using now instead of LMS which hosts students and people can track their learning. You can track their learning, you can take payments and things like that. So an LMS is like a house which hosts courses and enables tracking and reporting basically. They're really cool. All right, so let's have a look at some traditional LMSs. They refer to themselves as an LMS and they are for mass hosting. So I would say that very large organizations use these who have a lot of staff. So I worked in the government previous to owning my own business and definitely the government organizations I worked for have LMSs. I also recently consulted for Suncorp Bank and they also had their own LMS which hosted their courses. So I'm going to run through a couple of traditional LMSs that are big in the market right now and have been for a long time and I'll explain each one to you. All right, so Moodle. Moodle is one of the biggest open source LMSs on the planet. Open source means that anybody can grab the code for Moodle and make it what they want. It hosts courses, I mean honestly, it hosts courses but it does an amazing array of things in regards to hosting courses, hosting students, things like that. One of the downfalls of Moodle is that you actually, in my mind, you need to know how to code and you need to basically need access to a Moodle expert to be able to use Moodle as a hosting platform for your courses. I don't recommend it to people but I do have a lot of people come to me and say, have you heard of Moodle? At which point I do a little bit of a shudder and I say, look I have heard of Moodle but I don't personally help people install Moodle for their companies or implement into their companies. You actually need a Moodle expert to be able to do that for you. I honestly believe and in my experience of working with people who do have a Moodle as an LMS is that they are more trouble than they are worth unless you have mad coding skills and have a lot of time on your hands. I wouldn't bother with it but it's worth mentioning because it is out there and people do ask about it. Next one, Talent LMS. Talent LMS is one of my favourite LMSs. It is extremely user-friendly. I recommend it to my clients who have staff members. It's great for onboarding staff, giving them their own profiles, you can have as many courses as you want on there. It does have a pricing system so I think it starts off at a free price where you might be able to have a couple of courses with a couple of learners but then it goes up all the way to an enterprise solution where if you have you know a few hundred courses with a few thousand staff or a few thousand students you can host them on Talent LMS. Talent LMS enables you to build a course in a SCORM type format which I mentioned in the last topic which is using course building software such as Articulate, Storyline or Rise and then embedding it into Talent LMS. Moodle also has the same feature which enables a really dynamic way of creating and delivering an online course but Talent LMS also has the option for you to write your course directly into the system so it just has like text boxes which you can fill in, you can add your own pds videos, images, all things like that. It does assessments really well, you can grade students, I think I mentioned leaderboards, things like that are really cool as well. I really like Talent LMS. I think it's worth its weight in regards to what it offers compares to its pricing. Yeah and I suggest you check it out, jump on their website and have a bit of a look and see what you think. All right the next one is SAP Litmus. So SAP you've probably heard of before, it's a really big company which I can't explain because I actually don't know much about it but I do understand what Litmus is. So Litmus is very similar to Talent LMS. It's probably its more expensive luxury older cousin, very expensive but for large organisations it is great. It runs, I think it's thousands of dollars basically per year to be able to run a Litmus. So you would be really wanting to have a serious learning education organisation to want to implement Litmus. I do help people implement this into their companies but yeah it's probably not for everyone but it is out there and it is ranked as one of the best LMSs on the market at the moment. We also have Go1. Go1 is very similar to Talent LMS. It is Australian owned which is really cool. A couple of dudes, I think they're from Brisbane or three dudes from Brisbane own Go1. I personally really like it, very similar to Talent LMS. What it does have though which is a little bit dissimilar to Talent LMS is that it hosts courses that you can buy. I think Litmus does the same thing though so you can actually buy content that people have uploaded themselves. So say you have a course in customer service, Go1 can actually host that course for you and sell it to other people which is pretty cool. So not only does it have this course uploading ability and hosting, you can use a SCORM content or you can just put the course directly into Go1. It has the course building software built in but yeah you can also sell your course through Go1 which is pretty cool. Also it's Australian which you can't go past. And the last one I like to mention is Accelerate. So this is another Australian company. It is, I would say, mid-level expensive. It's in the thousands but you would only use Accelerate if you were working for a registered training organisation. So in Australia in particular, registered training organisations, they are organisations which sell and deliver courses that are certified. So certificate 2, 3, 4, diploma, things like that. And what Accelerate offers is when you are assessing someone for a certified course, you often need to have heavy proof that the person who is doing the quiz or doing the assessment is the person, is actually the person. And there's a body in Australia called Asqua and they're a training regulatory body and what they do is they will come into an RTO and they will look at all your training assessments and they crack down heavily on online assessments because how can you prove that the person who says they are doing the course hasn't actually got their wife to do the quiz for them. So Accelerate has a really cool ability to take pictures of the person as they're doing the quiz to make sure that it is actually them. I think, I believe Moodle has the same option as well and perhaps the others might have, I don't think Talent LMS has that but Accelerate definitely has that and they are definitely in the RTO market. So they're a really cool company that is taking off as well and has that extra ability. Alright, so I'm sure I've scrambled your brain and introduced you to all these crazy traditional LMSs. Now let's get to some options that I'm sure you have heard about. Now these are the new platforms. They are an LMS but they don't brand themselves as an LMS because I think they are trying to make themselves sound friendlier to the course creators out there that have never created a course before. So I call them the new DIY type platforms. So Kajabi, I'm sure you know Kajabi, Teachable and Podia. Now these are all all-in-one platforms. They, you can build your course in them, you can host videos, images, documents, quizzes, assessments. They can also be your website which is really cool. They can also be your sales funnel. They'll do emails and sales funnel-y type things. They will also sell your course as well. So there are shops, a shop that you build into your little website. So it's an all-in-one and they are fantastic. I am so pleased that these are out in the market. They are making building courses and selling courses so accessible to the everyday person. I think they're amazing. So I personally use Teachable. I have not used Kajabi or Podia. I do outsource those to people who are professionals in those mainly because I have a lot to do and I don't need to be dealing with all the platforms in the world. I would rather share the load but I do know that they are all amazing. And oh also another one is Thinkific. I didn't put that on this list but Thinkific is excellent as well. And from a user perspective, these are beautiful, beautiful looking, user-friendly from the user, from like the participatory perspective but also from the building perspective. You don't need any fancy course creation software for these guys. You don't need your articulates or your captivates. You don't need any of that crap. You can just whack your course directly into these platforms and away you go. So I think they are amazing. Now the last one I want to mention is LearnDash. Now LearnDash is an LMS. It is also a platform as well. So it will host your course. You can either add in SCORM or you can build the course directly in there. But what LearnDash does, that is completely unique to the rest of the companies that I've suggested on this page, is LearnDash integrates as a plugin for WordPress websites. Now I train people to use TalentLMS, SAP, Litmas, Teachable and LearnDash. I find that LearnDash seems to be becoming one of the more popular ways that people want to be able to deliver their online courses. Because they might already have an existing WordPress website. They don't want to get rid of it. They don't want to convert to a Kajabi, a Teachable or a Podia. But they want to keep their beautiful WordPress website. But they want to plug in a course builder and a course hosting software. And so they ultimately turned to LearnDash. Now I love LearnDash for several reasons. It's fairly easy to use and if you find it difficult, I obviously train people, usually take about an hour and I'll train people on how to use it and upload their courses. It allows you to sell your course through your website. You can attach marketing to it as well. So email campaigns and things like that via the rest of your plugins on your website like SurveyMonkey or whatever you might want to use. And it's also, in my mind, the cheapest LMS on the market at the moment. So I think US, it might be about $180 US per year, which is incredible for a platform that allows you to have unlimited courses and unlimited students unheard of. So most of the other platforms will increase the price depending on how many courses you want to host and how many students you want to host. Whereas LearnDash, just don't worry about that. It's like $180 for the year and I just think it's incredible. So really looking to LearnDash is one of your potential options and yeah, I love it. So the ones, so just again, the ones that I use and that I prefer to use TalentLMS for businesses that have a few staff, maybe up to a hundred staff, brilliant. SAP Litmus for companies that have a lot of extra cash, want something a lot more fancy and have hundreds of staff. GoOne for the same reason as TalentLMS, that sort of low to mid-range. Accelerate for RTOs. Teachable is fantastic for the DIY, want to do it yourself. And LearnDash is great for people who already have their own website and just want to add a course builder to it. So I hope that has cleared up learning management systems and platforms. Please email me if you have any trouble with it or if you want me to clarify a little bit more. But what I do suggest you do now is go and research some of these companies and look at what they do and what they offer and see which ones take your fancy. They are all great in their own right and there are plenty more out there. I cannot list them all and new ones are getting created every day. So just keep your eyes peeled and let me know as well if you've got new ones that you think are great and I would love to add them to this video as well. So good luck learning management systems 101 is done. Well done everyone. All right good luck and I will see you in the next module. All right so that's the end of episode five. Thank you so much for sticking around and I hope you found that educational and interesting. Now if you want to create your own course or you are already creating courses but you really want to level up your ability to create courses for other people, perhaps not just for yourself, you should really jump on the Sparkle eLearning website. My website for my business sparkleelearning.com and check out the pre-sale for my course creation masterclass. That masterclass is so full of information it's ridiculous. I swear if you do that course you'll be able to create an online course for anybody and any topic. So I think it's on pre-sale at the moment for about 200 odd dollars don't quote me that Australian. But yeah it's going to go when it's live it's going to be full price very shortly. So I'm hoping by the end of this month it's going to be done. So yeah course creation people out there jump on it and have a bit of a look www.sparkleelearning.com and go to the courses tab and have a look there. All right so I am looking forward to the next episode of the main course. I'm hoping to interview a few course creators in the next month or so. So stay tuned for that and of course if you have any questions please feel free to jump on Instagram or YouTube and leave us a little comment. Any questions you might have I will answer them on the show. Looking forward to catching up with you all soon. Cheers.