Comparisons and advocacy

I have been reading the Moodle forums for about 3 years, researching e-learning for longer than that and recently completed a PGCE (teaching qualification) that included a research component into learning technology. The first time I have heard of sumtotal was when I just read your post. This may tell you something about the profile of the product.

Could you expand on the details of why the many people have told you that your positive outlook on moodle will drop if you look at sumtotal. Perhaps you can get them to give a description of the features, management interfaces, philosophical approach (pedagogical ideas) and the development/support community behind the product.

Same me,

i am looking for eLearning  tools since years, but never heard about sumtotal.

I had a brieve look at that page: There are a lot of case studies (if somebody needs templates - download them )

A lot of studies comparing tools like moodle have been written. Most of them are done by peolple, who do this in just view days or weeks - no idea how this works...

If you find a ready-to-go solution, which is very close to your situation and its successfull - take it...

Moodle is like a big Switzerland-Knife, a perfect tool - when you know how to use it - look at Mc Gyver, with just view things - he survives. And eLearning sometimes is surviving in the training ...

Ask your managers for a demonstration - best practice excamples normaly changes managers minds.

Ask them for external experts - to show them the opportunities - there are a lot in the moodle community

And then tell them - investments will be done just in training skills of your members ...

Peter

Being someone who has been involved in academic education for many years, I also have not come across SumTotal. Looks like a corporate training tool. Also looks pricey. When I did a stint as an Oracle administrator, I got a feel for the "corporate" model. Oracle sold a solution, but it was "buyer beware". The poor suits got conned into buying what they thought was a "state of the art", fortune 500, bee's knees solution that would make them lots of cash. But they had no idea of the hardware and resources needed to run it. I was hired after their existing IT staff quit because of the lack of resources. At the subsequent training courses I had to go to so Oracle support would talk to me, I overheard Oracle sales staff laughing about companies they had sold to, but had no money left to actually implement the product!

A quick look at SumTotal and I could find no technical specs on it. Just a lot of sales hype on how good they are at finishing their installs and migration projects. Maybe they do, but it will cost and if, like the experience I had with Oracle, they think your company is not a "big player", they may ignore your cries for help AFTER the cheque has cleared. Moodle costs nothing. You have complete control, and the help of 1000's of programmers and educators to help you create the resources you need. It'll run on a laptop, a Mac, a high end *inux server. And it may not be what your site needs. But you can run a pilot project, or a "feasibility study" and see.

Good luck!

Hi Andrea,

Sumtotal was created in 2004 from a merger between Click2Learn (makers of Aspen LMS) and Docent (which should need no introduction), and Sumtotal then acquired Pathlore in 2005. So Sumtotal is made up of three of the biggest names in the Enterprise LMS world. Possibly the reason some Moodlers haven't heard of it is that Moodle predominantly (although certainly not uniquely) operates in the academic world, whereas Sumtotal (and the three LMSes which preceded it) predominately operates in the corporate/blue chip world. I've been working for a UK e-learning content development company for 10 years and have come across Pathlore and Aspen environments at our client sites many times, however not nearly as much as Docent, which is incredibly popular. Many Docent customers are now upgrading to the latest version of Sumtotal LMS, some major UK clients of ours are just migrating their environments at the moment. Sumtotal is massive, make no mistake about it.

Regarding the pros and cons of each, the big advantage of Moodle is that it is hugely configurable. Docent and those enterprise LMSes are all well and good if you want to deliver learning to hundreds or thousands of employees and create magnificent management reports and integrate with your HR system, etc, but it's a very formal, top-down approach to learning, and is nowhere near as collaborative and social (i.e. 'informal') an environment as Moodle. As 'informal learning' seems to be the big buzzword this year, Moodle supports that better than any proprietary system, so you could use the formal vs informal learning argument in your case too, try Googling that one! I have lots of informal learning links on del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/elearning2.0 too, more technical than pedagogic stuff, but may be of interest.

Moodle is also infinitely more extensible than Sumtotal, and I think that is its greatest advantage. The amount of out-of-the-box modules that come with Moodle and can be enabled/disabled is impressive, and the amount of third party modules that you can download and plug in it is truly amazing. It really is the most configurable and extenible LMS I've ever seen, and I've worked with most of the major corporate and academic LMSes in the UK market. In a nutshell, you will be able to make it fit the needs of your organisation's learning strategy, rather than having to do the opposite and design your learning strategy to meet the needs of a proprietary off-the-shelf package.

The other advantage of course is that it's open source. It is a hugely popular open source project, professionally developed and supported but with an immense user and developer community which means that informal support via the forums is excellent. As a popular open source project you can bet it will continue to be developed and extended at a much faster pace than any proprietary LMS. It is also so popular that numerous professional support services have sprung up around it (Moodle Partners) - so paid-for support is available if you want it. Check out http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php to find many more generic points and mythbusters about why open source is good for your business.

I don't think your positive outlook on Moodle would drop at all if you see any other proprietary LMS. In general I find the proprietary enterprise LMSes to be pretty badly designed from an administrative user's perspective, and overly complex for many organisation's needs, especially small and medium sized enterprises (SME's). If you are an SME, and wish to foster a social, collaborative approach to learning, Moodle is the way to go. Many of our clients, of all sizes including national public sector bodies, who don't have an LMS presently but wish to install one, are choosing Moodle. And the Open University has now gone live with Moodle for 12,000 students, as if you need proof that it suits the larger organisations too.

Good luck with your business case,
Mark

I think this is key:

"Is a long term asset" he said.

In my opinion, a rented house is not really an asset, it is more of a liability:

• you have to keep paying every year to use it,
• the rent might go up at any time,
• and there is a high cost of moving to another house.

Likewise I'd say a rented classroom. Perhaps likewise a rented virtual classroom.

If you look at the cost of your license over the period you plan to use an LMS as rent, take that rent money and instead invest it in building into Moodle tools that improve your teaching and your student's learning, then you have an asset.

I convinced our corporation to run a "Proof of Concept" project with Moodle.  They are using the SumTotal LMS (without the Learning Content Management System). Does anybody have any information how we can get the 2 systems to talk to each other?