There are two types of learning systems. I’m not talking about an LMS, LXP, combo, TDP, or EXP (drop the name on that), learning platform, or “We are not an LMS, and anyway, they are a dying breed” (I’ve written that is far from true). What I am referring to, is commercial or in-house. In-house is really popular, among many companies, academia (Moodle was originally designed for academia, and is heavily used there, still), organizations, associations, even 3rd party content publishers.
Commercial is fee-based. It is built by a vendor – you pay to “buy the system” which really means you are leasing it. You purchase seats (some vendors refer to it as licenses). You may have to buy for multi-tenant, or e-commerce functionality, or additional add-ons, if the vendor offers it. You can scale, but it is not free, and therefore it turns off some folks – the whole scaling part, and actually the whole we have to pay fees for this and that.
For me, though it is a series of misnomers to go the free route. In-house (a term I will use when talking to folks who do this – and yes, I’ve had clients that home build – the same term as in-house), ignores several premises, even today (many the same as years ago).
- UI/UX – It’s not good with in-house. It will never match (as a whole) some of the very slick UI/UX systems, and for plenty of people that build in-house, they are fine with that. The issue though is whether or not the learners are that enthralled. Folks that go in-house will point to usage, and people are not saying anything, and it’s about the content (courses). If you have a custom shop build your system (you can’t say in-house, because the last time I looked, custom shops charge fees to do so), I’ve seen some solid looks – but it isn’t free.
If you decide to build 100% in-house, congrats – but the UX side is not going to match as a whole, commercial systems because of one simple fact. The majority of vendors in the industry, their R&D goes to the system. They push capital into the platform. It is their cash cow.
Now have I seen some commercial systems whose UI/UX is seriously brutal and just ugh outdated, but still has big-name clients, who do not seem to care about that? Absolutely. Still, to me, I ask myself, if they – the person who green lighted this purchase of said system, would they use the system and rave about its UI/UX to everyone? They seem to forget the latter.
- Functionality – Let’s look alone at AI (generative). Yes, you can find plenty of third-party free add-ons to stick into your free system, heck you can get an offering such as Falcon, which costs ZIP, to use as your LLM (foundation needed), but you better have the skill sets to develop and build it out. Then, you have to add your own data, fine-tune, and enjoy all the wonderful aspects that come with a free open-source LLM (which can rock, if you know what you are doing, but it’s input and output may not hit the range of fee-based LLM).
Then you have that whole skills development piece tied to your recommendation which outputs content/courses based on what skills and job roles you select. If you want to achieve better results you will go with machine learning, which is an algorithm. Your results are never 100% perfect, due to what you weighted or how you trained your machine learning. So, you need to find someone who knows how to do this in-house. On the commercial side, yes, I see a lot of machine learning algorithms whose results are flawed due to the training of it. The sad part is that the buyer has no idea.
On the in-house, it is brutal, which is why it isn’t a popular feature to add. That person has to exist again at your business – because once you outsource that, Tada – fees. And the whole premise of in-house is zero fees (ignoring that resources – the humans are actually earning a wage). Okay, you say to yourself, look it may cost us some stuff to build our in-house, but the costs outlay will be far lower than us going commercial. Which is not an uncommon argument I hear on the whole in-house vs commercial route.
Therefore, let’s make the assumption that your in-house system will have costs to it, but you own it 100% (commercial you don’t), you can scale it without paying additional costs/fees, you can add functionality for free – assuming you are using say Moodle or another 100% open source freebie whose community is active (a big need) or you are building using err, having someone whose tech skill sets are building it, and therefore at the lowest rung, can add some things, by building it.
The functionality though compared to a commercial system (as a whole in the industry, because it is by no means always the case, plenty of commercial systems, lack basic feature sets), will not match. It will be lower. Because the investment on the folks building in-house will never match the commercial vendor (again as a whole). Let’s say the in-house investment is 25K. The commercial vendor (and I’m not talking about Cornerstone or similar) can go easily over 100K.
Notwithstanding though, an often used (not publicly mentioned), route is to have a dev team from Eastern Europe add those items, capabilities. If your company is based in India, then the dev team is always from India. Are there vendors in the states that have dev teams in other places, beyond Eastern Europe? Yes. Based specifically in the country where the vendor is based? 100% – this is quite common – in fact the majority. However, for those that go the other route, the investment to build is lower.
But the outcome of what can be developed functionality wise commercial side, is going to be stronger. And yes, the vendor will continuously invest, whether they go outsource dev team (who works for the vendor) or does in internally – most make continuous updates and can add much quicker than something that is built in-house.
Support, whether it is customer, or tech support, or a combo of both, on the commercial side, should be better than in-house. First off, let’s look at the in-house options (and for those who have gone this way…)
In-house Support – A support desk
- You need folks to oversee this and help. They must have expertise in the system – which will require you to train them on the entire system, plus verify the quality of the support, and oh, make sure you hire people who are knowledgeable of said system, have customer service skill sets, and be willing to respond to any issue, at least acknowledging it within 30 minutes (during business hours).
- You will need to maintain metrics to find out who is doing a great job, who isn’t and why. Plus, you will need to devise or find another customer support/tech support matrix approach – plenty exist. NPS? Seriously? Even those folks tell you to use a secondary metrics, and oh, not to many folks who use an in-house or commercial system will say, “What? Your NPS is less than 70%?” – That’s because a lot of people have no idea on what it means, and don’t care.
- What will be your process and plan for customer support? How many people will you staff? Do any have a training background? How will you ensure that the person shows up at the time they are supposed to? What is your process for escalation? How do you define it? If it is high, who maintains that and is the go-to person working on it?
These items above, are just the basics. Are there commercial systems whose support is below average or downright awful? You bet. But I believe there are far more whose support is above average and higher, than compared to an in-house system.
Oh, and there is a cost to customer support/tech support. There is always a cost, and thus if you are going in-house, you will need to calculate that. Don’t cheap out and just use a bot, because folks get angry quickly, and those bots that are customer support bots or someone goes Zendesk, frustrate. Lastly, just dropping somehow to videos and a FAQ (nobody reads this), nor often the “HELP” thing, and those videos, well, I’ve seen plenty that tells me the person who created it, has zero background in training – a crucial piece BTW. Actually, Zendesk isn’t free, so that in-house system will increase its cost.
Scale Up
Okay, before bouncing into scaling, I should ask, where is that in-house system being housed? I assume it is SaaS, and not a bunch of servers at your location, which causes another big NONONO.
Do you house on AWS? (There are fees for that). Google Cloud? Microsoft Azure? Some other servers farm. The first three offer additional capabilities, thus if you use them, there is a cost addition.
The majority of vendors in the industry use AWS. Azure is a solid second.
Scaling up – an often reason to go in-house, ignores a few points. Yes, you can scale up without any fees to you, but let’s assume that you are selling content to another business entity. And this entity, wants to add more users than what they purchased (because that isn’t free to them), and so you do. Generating a nice pocket of cash in the process. Some folks – 3rd party publishers who go this way, actually have a team in-house or a person who handles this, before the buyer uses the system. The publisher, even if it is a five-person team, who is behind this, angles the whole scale up pitch, forgetting that the buyer is the one who is outlaying the fees to do so. Think about that.
In-house vendor cost for scaling up? Zero. The buyer? Not zero. Okay, I know you are going to say what about if we build our own in-house system which is going to be used 100% by our employees or members? The scaling up fees to us, are nothing. Compared to a commercial vendor.
Okay, but let’s refer back to the whole UX aspect. Your employees are using a junker, or something of not strong quality, and you – the L&D team or IT team or let’s be real, the company sees no issue with that.
What does it say as a company and its commitment they pitch for their employees when it comes to personal and professional development (a common theme) or we are providing content/courses to help with their skills and job roles – I’m focused more here on the system itself.
A forward-thinking company has a built in-house system that looks like they forgot their own angle. An old school company who still says they value their employees, but outputs something that my web site built in 1994 looks better (granted, it was really cool).
If I am a customer of the company, and getting access to use the system for free, what does that say to them? Hey, look at our clunker – but we are a forward-thinking company! Save your time – and show them how to find Alta Vista using the Wayback Machine on the Internet.
It never looks good. And it I believe ignores the premise of learning to your employees – because yeah it is free, yeah, we care about you, yeah, we give you courses/content (that we built ourselves), but you get to use a junker, or a fair UI, and so-so UX. Nice.
Yes, there are companies who buy junkers that are commercial, because it is either cheap or they don’t care. I should note there are some very inexpensive systems whose UI/UX will wow you, including one vendor who is in my Top 10 for 2023.
I’d argue though (and yes, I am doing it right now) the clunkers are more on the in-house then commercial.
The Moodle Community
As earlier noted, it is by far the most popular choice when it comes to 100% open source – free. However, their business-focused version Moodle Workplace isn’t free. On top of that, accessing the code is a no-go.
The new 4.3 LMS version of Moodle has a front-end pleasant look, but please when they are mentioning educators in their pitch, is their focus on business or corporate or someone who sells content?
What is fee-based on free Moodle
- Certified Partners and Service Providers
- Hosting
- Expert helps with customization and development
- Expert helps with Learning Design
- Support and Training
Ahh, you say, we can do all if it ourselves. A savings.
Next up you need some added functionality, to stay current. And let’s for sake of fun assume you are using 4.3 (again, my gut says a lot of folks aren’t).
But where you aware
- Not all the plugins are actually free. Some are trials.
- You need to know your API – which is also needed if you plan to do some integration with other systems outside of your platform.
- Not all the plugins are kept up to date
The plugin list – you will find this under the community angle. For those wondering.
- For the latest version 4.3, if you want LTI – you are out of luck, no plugin
- There is an OpenSesame connector which is cool, but the content is still fee based
- Workplace Certificate Manager – works with the latest version of Moodle, last updated Dec. 2023 – Basically you can create certificates with it. A bonus – you can have a QR code – not sure why that is a benefit, but hey, it’s “in”
- For those folks who went with Moodle Workplace version (fee-based), you can download a whopping amount of five plugins, but one doesn’t work with the latest version, and two are intertwined – i.e. you need both.
- The majority of the plagiarism plugins are fee-based. A couple offer AI – BUT DID YOU KNOW
That a lot of experts are now saying that the ability to actually identify what is plagiarized and what isn’t using AI, is getting a lot tougher, and the AI improves. Vendors who sell it of course will disagree. Anyway, who on the corporate side is using a plagiarism solution?
Looking for AI offerings in Moodle – well, I found one, it is a chatbot that has AI capabilities – which the chatbot is geared more towards a web site IMO, then within a system – oh, and those capabilities are fee-based.
In my own in-depth research to find Moodle plugins offering Generative AI, I ended up using AI to handle my searching. Because within the plugins page on Moodle, there were uh, one.
I used Copilot and found five – okay seven, but two were with plagiarism tools. The others? All five are fee-based. A fun fact about using Gen AI, is that you may receive different answers for the same question, even on different Gen AI sites. Thus, in my thirst to find Gen AI tools to work with Moodle, I went over to my good friend – Gemini (formally Bard). Hey Gemini – I found three. All fee-based, all from OpenAI.
No matter, I am going to zing over to GPT4 to tell me. I found four, the same four, that were in the Copilot version. The same ones which were in Gemini. But I can’t believe that is it. I am going over to a site, that gives you access to Claude 3 Opus, ChatGPT-4, Gemini Pro, Zephyr and many more. Well, oh grand ultimate AI site, any AI plugins for Moodle? Four.
Why the inquiries you might ask?
Because with Commercial systems that have already jumped into AI, not one of the plugins you can get today for Moodle, can create courses/content – unless you purchase GPT-4, and then just type in a bunch of text to create a text-based course. Seeking to tie Skills to job roles? There are commercial systems working on it today. Moodle? Not a chance. Seek to go beyond just a Gen AI text-based option? You won’t find it with Moodle.
Way too many folks that go built-in, if they go and search – want the pie in the sky, even though their own system doesn’t even make a half a pie. They get sticker shock when they identify systems they want, with all the cool features they need, and then when they see the shock, go back to their system, because hey it’s free on our end.
What this tells me is that they didn’t do their due diligence. If you can’t afford system A, you might be surprised that there are plenty of systems that have the slick UI/UX, and strong features that won’t break the bank.
If you need a content creator within the learning system – commercial – remember they will never match an off the shelf high-end tool. The reason is simple. The learning system vendor is not in the authoring tool space. They add it in, because there is a demand. If really want something that someone intermediate can do, there is one vendor who offers it, with AI – that is not just for beginners. But to assume that the content creator tool that comes with the system is going to match Articulate or dominKnow or even Captivate (which has changed it dramatically) is far fetch.
Bottom Line
If you dig around, you will find a commercial system that will meet your needs. It won’t bust the bank, and frankly if you include that AI piece into your search, find ones that either have it now, or are building it by the end of the year (better for you).
But don’t buy into the idea that a built-in system is far better than a commercial system. Yes, you can buy a clunker system, there are plenty, and yes, you can buy a system that doesn’t have the features you have, there are plenty, but you can buy one that is inexpensive, will scale, offer you top support, strong functionality, rapid development and all the wonderful stuff you need (depending on what you need).
And if you need an integration with ABC, a commercial system can do it. Need to have stronger tracking of data for selling your content? There are learning systems – commercial that can do that, without breaking the bank.
The choice is yours.
Realize though that the arguments made today, on why to go built-in, are no longer in play. A different time, perhaps.
Now,
Not a chance.
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Note: Images are created using Generative AI
