Best LMS for Higher Education (Colleges & Universities)
Find the perfect LMS for your college or university. Our expert review of the best LMSs for higher education covers Canvas, Blackboard & more.
In this video, we explore the top Learning Management Systems (LMS) tailored specifically for colleges and universities. Discover how these innovative platforms enhance the educational experience, streamline administration, and foster student engagement. From user-friendly interfaces to advanced analytics, we cover the key features that make these LMSs stand out. Don’t miss out on valuable insights.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:02.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 134. In this show, we’re going to be talking about the best LMSs for higher education, colleges, universities, schools, and anything teaching institution. There are a lot of choices out there. We’re going to examine the SaaS and WordPress solutions available. It should be a great show. So, Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:48.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Love to, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called Manana Nomas, which focuses largely on membership and learning websites, and we work directly with the great team at WP Tonic.
[00:00:59.480] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s Fantastic. As I mentioned, we’ll be exploring the best choices for learning management systems in higher education. Should be a great show. You should get some great value from it. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we begin the show, I also want to point out that we have a great course, created by Kirk himself, that shows you how to build a managed membership website using a learning management system, Lifter LMS, and the best page builder, all utilizing the best WordPress technology from start to finish. It’s normally around $49, but we’re doing a special offer. You get it at half price. Plus, if you buy the course, you’ll get a coupon that will take 50% of your first year’s hosting with WP Tonic, and you will have access to all the technology Kirk shows you how to use. What a great combination. You can also receive a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services. You can get all this by visiting WP-Tonic.
[00:02:24.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Com/dills. Wp-tonic. Com/dills. And you can get all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Before we go into specifics, what are your observations about the choices out there, Kirk? What would you like to share before we proceed, as I mentioned, into Pacific Solutions?
[00:02:54.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
The very title of the show, in my mind, makes some assumptions that the audience has a basic understanding of corporate and higher-level education sources. The main thing that I come into is, I mean, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of choices for platforms to look at, and we could only really scratch the surface. Some of the names that you picked on this list, Jonathan, are right up my alley. I mean, these are some of the things I worked with at Ducati and Suzuki and BRP, and places like that. Then there are a couple of others that are on my radar as well. But this will be good.
[00:03:37.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of choice out there. I’ve chosen some that I think have gained traction, or more than that. Some of them have a large share of the market, but they’re all ones. There is one, maybe one or two, that I wouldn’t say were concerned, but they’re a much smaller player; however, they seem to be some of the leaders in the market.
[00:04:10.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
You have a couple on the list, Jonathan, that are almost like the Google of eLearning, meaning in my frame of reference, they’re almost the verb or the go-to word for it. So, even if someone wasn’t using that platform, they might still refer to it by that name. They’ll say, Oh, go to the Blackboard, or go to the Canvas, or go to the… And that’s not even what they’re using. They’re just those brands are so ubiquitous in use in the industry that sometimes the title of those is like a Post-it note. It’s not always made by Post-it, right? But we all know it’s a piece of paper with some sticky stuff on it. Yes, there are a couple of well-known, well-used, and well-established names on this list. And to be clearer, I think if we’re talking, there are differences in audiences. There’s a difference between someone who’s shopping for the LMS a difference in someone who’s the instructional designer making the content for the LMS. In many cases, they are two completely separate people. It’s interesting to have this breakdown today.
[00:05:12.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and that’s an oddity of the situation. It doesn’t solely apply to high education. It applies to any organization that’s got any budget. The content tends to be divorced by the decision maker who’s going to choose the particular technology platform. So let’s start with Canvas LMS. I’ve got my own views. I haven’t used this in Anga. I did a fair bit of research on all this before I knew we were going to discuss it in the show today. So do you know anything about it and what’s your own conclusions about it?
[00:06:00.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Canvas as a product is a phenomenal product. I mean, it’s established, it’s consistent, it’s reliable, like all of those things. But what I don’t see, and we’re going to see this with most of these tools, so let’s just put this out there right away, the environment doesn’t lend a lot to its creativity. And so it’s good at getting students in, student reporting, it runs score material, It sinks with reporting. It does those things, but it’s not giving you complete design freedom to create the environment around the learning. And that’s a lot of the learning management systems we’re discussing today are like that, where it’s just a site that provides the learning and the reporting, and then it’s understood that it’s either a subdomain to another project or there’s other marketing material or other material that goes around this product, as opposed as opposed to being that product.
[00:07:02.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, the research I did in it, Kirk, is it was started in 2011. It was started by two founders that were at Brigham Young University in Utah. They were frustrated. I think that they were part-time or involved in producing content for the Brigham Young University, and they were frustrated, and I think they were into development and IT, and they produced their own, which was initially supported and developed for the Brigham Yung University. And then the reviews I watched and read, you get a blank canvas, and you’re supposed to have, which is a little bit different to what you what you’re stating, the reviews I watched and read, they were saying it’s compared to some of the other offerings in the SaaS world, it offered a lot more ability to produce your own content. It was a white canvas, pun there. But as I was watching the content and reading it, I was thinking, Well, maybe, but you get the ultimate control by looking at WordPress and some of the solutions there. I was a little bit bemoozed by what seems to be one of its powerful selling points. The interface looked fine, the key elements to it.
[00:08:50.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that was my impression. How would you respond, Kurt?
[00:08:54.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think we’re going to find similar descriptions among the different products because remember, the instructional design is removed from the actual platform. Yes. And so that’s the hard thing to really… Thinking about Membership Machine show and who our audience normally as we’re talking about, membership and learning websites, and we talk about other things in the WordPress space or even Kajabi space, where you’re building the course inside the site. And inside, there’s a course builder as part of the platform. A lot of these professional high level LMSs don’t have course builders. So you’re building the instructional development is happening in Articulate 360, Captivate. I think there’s one called Spring or iSpring.
[00:09:44.700] – Jonathan Denwood
And That’s how I spring learn, yes.
[00:09:46.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and that content is then imported into these systems. And so if I was going to say, and I know people at Canvas probably wouldn’t like this likening, but I’ve recently did a project and learn upon, and learn upon was like that. Very plain, open canvas, if you will, just very plain and open, and then you put your content in it and then it’s there.
[00:10:11.920] – Jonathan Denwood
You can use it the way you describe, but it does have a forum chat ability. It’s got a lot of functionality there. It seems the pricing is fair. It’s $5 per user. Obviously, you got to find out if that’s $5 per user is active or nonactive. That’s what you’ve always got to check, isn’t it?
[00:10:36.030] – Kurt von Ahnen
That pricing model is the exact reason that I searched and looked for anything outside of these types of platforms. That’s what led me originally to WordPress. And then in WordPress, I went through Tudor LMS, LearnDash, and Lifter LMS, finally settling on Lifter LMS for my stuff. And it was my The whole inspiration to go the WordPress route was because of these pricing models that are based on user licensing. Because as your project grows, your costs keep growing. It never It closed down. It keeps getting more and more expensive.
[00:11:18.020] – Jonathan Denwood
On to the next one, which is, I suppose, one of the big daddies in the area, that’s Blackboard. I think the price starts at 9,500 $300 per year.
[00:11:34.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Plus, plus, plus after that.
[00:11:36.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of pluses, isn’t there? If somebody was asking you about Blackboard, how would you describe it to?
[00:11:47.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
This is one of those situations, Jonathan, where people… It’s like to switch the gear. Sometimes we’ll say, Oh, we can build you a really cool thing in WordPress. And someone will say, Oh, I don’t want to use WordPress. It’s like that instantaneous reflex without having the facts. I find customers that mention Blackboard. They mention Blackboard because they’ve heard of Blackboard or because they used it in another school before, or they feel a certain familiarity with it from a certain environment. But I can’t wrap my head around what it delivers versus what it costs over time and over expansion and scale. It is expensive. But again, I’m going to say the same thing I said with Canvas. Is it reliable? Yes. Does it do what it says it’s going to do? Yes. Does it host your Scorm content? Absolutely. But that pricing model, you’re out 10 grand a year before you even start to sign people up.
[00:12:43.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s the old saying in IT, if you buy a service or product from IBM, you’re going to be taken to the cleaners, but you’re not going to get sacked. I think with a lot of people, Blackboard is It’s the safe traditional offering in no shape or form. In my opinion, is it a market leader? It’s weak in many areas when it comes to UX and usability design. I don’t know many people in users or people that have to attempt in the back-end that love it, but that’s my opinion. On to the next one. Bright Space by 2DL. Don’t know much, did some research on it. To me, you could classify it as a direct competitor to Blackboard. I think it started in Canada, I think it started off with a couple of developers in Canada, and I think it was a Canadian University. In some ways, it’s parallel to Canvas. But Canada, a Pacific University, they saw opening and they built it up. So it did seem to have the best-looking interface to me, and the reviews I watched confirmed my impression. Do you know much about it at all?
[00:14:30.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
You touched on some of my personal thoughts on this and something I wanted to point out, and we got here, so that’s great. When you look at Canvas and you look at Blackboard, you are seeing two very established, very recognized, very respected platforms. But to me, they offer very little anything from from design, from freedom of design to user experience. I mean, you get what you get. Cookie cutter. Put your content in. Here’s the reporting. Have a nice day. And it works. It does what they say it’s going to do. And there are functions like Jonathan pointed out. You can add a chat function or a forum function. But when you look at D2L, they did some interesting things. They added some what I consider deeper elements of design to their platform. It seems like there’s a little more freedom of design. And the other thing is, while the other platforms really held faithful to this idea of Scorm and Scorm and Articulate 360 and Captivate, that whole microcosm of development, D2L specifically stepped out of that and invited people with that H5P mindset. And if you’re not familiar with H5P, H5P is the open sourced solution to a lot of that Articulate 360 stuff.
[00:15:55.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
But it’s open source, it’s free. Articulate 365, last I checked was like $3,300 a year for a license per person. So I think D2L made a really good strategy move. They made a site that looked good. They added some of those design elements for their clients, and they went after that direct market that was away from that super expensive instructional design side. H5p is more like… You can be more of a course creator and less of a to work with H5P and be more hands-on with building your content. I’d like the direction they went there. I think that’s cool.
[00:16:38.360] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s fantastic. I did some research on price. All I can find is the price is on request.
[00:16:45.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s always scary.
[00:16:46.740] – Jonathan Denwood
I presume it’s expensive. On to the next one, Educate Me. I did some research on the company based in New York. It was a startup with VC backing. I think they got nine people in the team. Got a much more modern interface UX design, but to me, I can’t remember how many years they’ve been in the sector, but in no way do they compare to Canva or Blackboard. It looked a more modern interface, got more of what I would expect, but I don’t know too much about it. Do you know anything more?
[00:17:37.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t know if people are going to remember this, but do you remember before it became LinkedIn Learning, it was called Linda Learning? Yes. The platform to me feels like a Linda Learning thing, the way it’s structured. But as far as using it, this is one of those fringe items that I haven’t had a chance to try yet, so I really don’t don’t have any hands on first person knowledge of it other than the look and feel of it. I did think it was cool that it has some integrations that are… As far as newer things would go, would be expected. It has a Slack integration, for example. When you look at Canvas or Blackboard, that’s not right at the top of the list. And so the idea, pardon me, the idea that as a newer platform in the market, they’re going to add types of features that might be real attractive to some folks.
[00:18:33.400] – Jonathan Denwood
But they are not being disparaging to them, but it just seems to be an enormous amount of players in this secondary market. What I mean by this secondary is they’re not second rate. It’s just that there’s some big players, and there always seems to be new SaaS players trying to muscle in to the learning management area, doesn’t it? It’s a bit like CRMs. There’s always There’s some new CRM out there, isn’t it?
[00:19:04.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
I always struggle to figure out, Jonathan, where that confidence comes from, because I look at the eLearning market as being incredibly saturated. I mean, there’s just hundreds upon hundreds of choices for places to host your course. And in fact, when we talk to people like Chris from Lifter LMS, he’s the first to say, oh, I thought I was late to market. I thought I was already too late to the game. And that turned out it worked for them. But their platform works a little differently differently than its competition. So then you go, okay, well, that’s the difference. These other platforms, when they pop up and they go, hey, we can host your score material for $150 a month, that’s probably real attractive because they’re opening Their opening pricing model was, I think, 150 a month. And when you compare that to Blackboard at 10 grand a year, you go, oh, okay, well, that makes sense. I’ll try that out. But then in the back of your mind, you’re always thinking, should I go on with Blackboard? Should I go on with Blackboard?
[00:20:00.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think we’re going to go for a break. I’ve got some more sasses, and then we go on to the open source and WordPress. But I think we go for a break, and then we got a right balance of what we covered in the first and what we got left in the second. Hopefully you found this content useful. I think we’ve gone through a lot in the first half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks, I want to point out another great resource for you, and this one’s totally free. It’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. It’s totally free on Facebook. All you have to do is go on to Facebook, put in the Membership Machine Group in, and we pop up. And it’s totally free. And if you’ve got any questions that come to you during listening to this show, you can ask them there. What more could you ask for? On we go. I updated the show notes and I emailed you. Hopefully you got it. Because I just added, Absorb LMS and Talent LMS. Obviously, there’s differences, but when you’re doing a review on SaaS, these two seem really in a death battle.
[00:21:26.080] – Jonathan Denwood
They always seem to come up. They The titles are very similar. Absorb LMS, Talent LMS. Talent has a much more understandable, not understandable, I’m struggling for the right word. Their pricing structure seems more clear-cut, where Absorbe, you’ve got to get the prices on request. But they’ve got a very clean but sparing interface. Both of them, I think. They look very similar, but there must be differences. Got any thoughts on either one, Kurt?
[00:22:07.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
I have not used Absorb LMS before, but when I was going through their stuff today, I know it’s probably a great feature. I know that people are going to love when I mention this, and they’re probably going to say, Kurt, why do you seem so reserved about this? But they are really pushing this artificial intelligence course generation. And when you go through this, I know that I know that I know that people are going to be like, oh, I got to have this. But I want to really stress everything, a grain of salt with this AI stuff. Seamless course creation, smarter course recommendations, strategic upskilling. And so strategic upskilling is, from what I understand, it’s like, based on the results of your student, we’re going to give them this content instead. It’s It’s very interesting to me. I want to see how this works. I know that with the work I’ve done with a lot of the eLearning projects in the past, we have leveraged AI for different things with outlining or trying to come up with different user centers secured benefits from using AI, and it is very, very difficult. It’s not everyone trying to make it sound like this is some easy thing is killing me right now because I think this is extremely difficult.
[00:23:28.190] – Kurt von Ahnen
And if this company has figured out a platform or a process or a prompt sequence that seems to help developers, I’m curious. I’d like to try it, to be honest with you.
[00:23:41.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think you put it very well there. Where the benefits and the prospects of it are very clear, but we’re in very early days, aren’t we? The examples I’ve seen I’m not being that impressed, to be truthful, but they’ve got a lot of experience. They’ve been in the market quite a while. But like I say, Absorb is priced on request with talent. These are monthly prices, by the way, folks. The core is 149 for 1-40 users. Growth is 299, 1-70 users. Pro 5, 7, 9 per month is 1 to 100 users. I don’t know if they’re active or not. I would imagine they’re just users. But they really do seem to be head to head in where one is being talked about, the other is around.
[00:24:50.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Something that I think needs to be pointed out that I probably just did a really poor job of doing earlier. All of the platforms we’ve mentioned so far have been hosting your content. You’re going to have an instructional designer or you’re the instructional designer or whatever, right? But you’re making the content and you’re looking for a platform to put that content into. Whereas Absorb LMS, they have a list of courses that fall in with this AI thing. And so there’s, I believe it was 20,000 courses or something like that that they have that become part of this upskilling menu base. And so part of your pricing is going to be access to content that you don’t even have to make.
[00:25:34.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think all the major players, WordPress, or they’re all going to be doing this very soon with different type of quality results. But yeah, because you’ve seen that with websites, we offer that AI in building your website on our platform. But because we’re in the WordPress space, the major players haven’t introduced that yet. They’re going to, I can guarantee you that. We just have to see how it goes, but all the major players in SaaS or WordPress are going to be adding that. It’s just a natural, isn’t it? In some ways, you want… Is it really having that precant? Because basically, you’re going to be able to produce a lot the content through whatever large learning language model you’re using anyway, but we have to see. Nobody really knows. Google Classroom, totally free. You get special prices. If you got to buy it through Workspace for education, I think they get a major discount. I don’t know much about… I would never use it because I wouldn’t want my child sharing results and information with Google. I don’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust, and I certainly want my school sharing educational results with Google.
[00:27:24.920] – Jonathan Denwood
But that’s my opinion. What was your thoughts, Kurt?
[00:27:30.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
So I agree with you on the Google thing, but at also a higher level through user experience as the student and user experience as the creator. And then before I give that, I just wanted to say, because I don’t think I said it, talent LMS. Did we talk about talent LMS?
[00:27:54.540] – Jonathan Denwood
I put talent with Xorb together.
[00:28:00.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
Just for the record, for those listening, because I didn’t say this out loud, and I want to make sure I give them the right kudos. Talent LMS is fantastic. I’ve used it before, and it’s very intuitive, very easy to track their dashboards, color coding, all of It looks good, works good, feels good, does everything. I don’t like the prices, but it’s your budget. That’s not my budget. We’re not shopping with my wallet today. We’re shopping with yours. The Google thing to me is a nightmare. You know how Google had Google circles and then it had Google plus, and then it had Google, some messaging thing that fated away? I feel that way with the Google Classroom. I feel like features get added, features get removed. You’re an instructor and you go to find something and it’s been discontinued or removed or access to something has changed. Students constantly getting like, verify your identity, have a parent do this, have a parent do that because they have that family check-in thing for kids. It really is a nightmare to use. I know that Google is the behemoth of the web space, and we’re all supposed to bow down, but I really, really struggle with Google products and their ability to keep something going and keep it straightforward.
[00:29:17.940] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not that surprising because this is such a small bit of their focus is on search and AI. And Android, I I think they’re the big pillars, search, AI. Android, they’re the big money makers or the possibility of making a lot of money.
[00:29:38.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t have a high trust factor with them. Even if they said, We are not training our large learning models on your kid’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust them that that was true. I just don’t like the platform. I don’t like how it works. No matter what, somebody, if you’re in an organization, because this whole show is about higher education, colleges and universities, somebody on some boardroom somewhere is going, Oh, but it’s free, so we have to use it. That is the worst way to make a decision for your learning content.
[00:30:12.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, let’s go on to the open source WordPress. I’m going to change the order. I’m going to start with Moodle, which is Quasar open source. They offer open source version, and then you can I get a hosted, supported version from them and third-party players as well. If somebody was asking you about Moodle, what would you say, Kerk? Because I know that you have done projects in Moodle. Yeah.
[00:30:45.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
I just did a test installation on Moodle about three months ago, just to make sure that not too much had changed on me since I had seen it last. Moodle is extremely powerful, Jonathan. I mean, granular control over content and users, and you get this big itemized menu in the background where you can split everything up. And once you get used to it, you feel empowered. If you’re the course creator, if you’re the learning administrator, creator for an organization, you can really get the impression that you feel like it’s a very competent platform. And I believe it probably is a competent platform. But there’s another side to this, which is the user interface is horrible. Students You’re constantly getting support tickets to reset passwords and where do I find this? And where do I find that? And I couldn’t figure out what the next course was or the next lesson was. And I ended up having to, when I ran a training program on Moodle, I had to do an awful lot of like tutorial type, like proactive tutorials to show people how to use the platform, how to this, how to that, because it just wasn’t very intuitive.
[00:31:59.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
The The worst thing that comes up when you install Moodle is a calendar. And that signifies what it was made for. If we think about eLearning as being like an asynchronous learning adventure, the calendar is the last thing that we need because everyone’s learning at their own pace on their own days. But for some reason, Moodle, when you install it, boom, now you got a calendar. And then people instantly struggle trying to figure out how they’re going to make asynchronous learning fit into a synchronous structure. And there’s a lot of contradictions in that. I think the platform is extremely powerful. I also think it is extremely confusing for the average user.
[00:32:37.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I think I’m right. I might be wrong about this. Didn’t the company start and they might still be based in Australia?
[00:32:44.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, I don’t know.
[00:32:45.560] – Jonathan Denwood
I think I might be wrong here, but I think- Back when I first got on with Ducati, Ducati used to have an external third-party training network for the technicians.
[00:32:58.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
My task when I went to Ducati was to internalize the training. And one of the first things I did was build a Moodle online version of training for Ducati. And we had all of the dealerships in North America and all the technicians were part of that program. I mean, it was trial by fire. It was instant. I just had to put in hundreds of people and lots of content and then pray that it worked. And it did. It worked. It was reliable. And like I said, over time, I felt very confident that there was a lot of functionality and a lot of granular control over things. It was really difficult for the users to really grab it.
[00:33:34.920] – Jonathan Denwood
They’ve updated it, but I think a lot of the things that you’re saying still applies.
[00:33:40.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I went through the updated version of it and I wasn’t It’s changed and it looks cleaner, but it’s the same confusion that was there before.
[00:33:52.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Like I said, they got a free version which you self-host, and then you got to provide your own support or buy support from third parties. They got a paid version that starts, which I think is very… They got a parent company that’s also the commercial, and that starts at $120 a month for 50 users.
[00:34:17.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, little piece of Trivia, when you get with a custom design house that’s going to make you a bespoke learning management system for a quarter million dollars, it’s normally based on Moodle. So these companies will They’ll take the open source version of Moodle, they’ll reskin it, they’ll pare down those menus. When you’re working on a corporate eLearning platform and it’s really clean and it has three options at the top of the page and then the learning content in the center of the page, those really simple LMSs that cost a fortune are generally made on Moodle. They’re just reskinned. So Moodle is the basis for a ton of learning platforms.
[00:34:56.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, right. On to the next one. I’m going to change the order a little bit. Let’s talk about LearnDash. I think for various reasons, I think in this… Because I cut the eLearning from internal training and public-facing training where you’re selling subscriptions, most of the systems we’re talking about are really internal-facing. With the two leading WordPress, that can be both, and they can be both very effectively. But I think because of when LearnDash started and the background of the founders and how Google historically sees LearnDash, when you’re doing a search for internal training and a WordPress solution, a lot of the when LearnDash comes up, and it’s a very good product. So if you were explaining LearnDash with the proviso of internal training, how would you explain it to people, Kurt?
[00:36:16.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a trick question you just gave me there, Jonathan. If it’s internal training and I’m not selling the courses and I’m just going to be putting people into training and assigning training and doing that from an internet perspective, chances are I’m going to recommend a different product, one that includes the membership tools with it.
[00:36:36.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, isn’t it? I would have thought… Oh, you surprised me there. Sorry.
[00:36:42.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I did. And sorry if I took you off the off-kilter there. It’s certainly affordable, right? At $1. 99 per year, it’s certainly affordable. And it will work for what you want to do, right? So you can assign people to training. It could be a subdomain in your main company or something like that. So from an internet perspective, LearnDash will do the job. It’ll give the courses. It’ll do that. I still like to have a little more control over, and I call it members, but it’s my users, my student list. And so I would still want to have a membership plugin. I would still want to be able to group people together in certain ways. And to do that, I would use either memberDash or some other type of membership third party plugin on of learn-dash. It’s just the way that my brain works in putting those platforms together. I know that we’re going to talk about another one that includes the member tools with it, and from an intranet perspective, is also free. That’s why I would recommend a different product in that situation.
[00:37:48.960] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t disagree what you’re saying. It’s just that I think one of the great weaknesses of LearnDash is when it’s public-facing because you are going to have to either utilize a third-party membership plugin or you’re going to have to use Woocommers. If you use Woocommers, they do provide an add-on, which they provide for free. When you buy a license which is $199, which for what it can do, I think is a bargain. I just see it’s main weakness, are you going to have to, if you’re public facing and you’re selling a subscription, if it’s internal, that weakness is removed. I think when it comes to UX design and functionality, it’s a good product, and it’s reliable, and universities have used it and used it very successively. On to another one, which I feel can We do both, external and internal, very well, as well as LearnDash, but because the way Google, and for historical reasons, gets more exposure for external, but based on my experience, can do both, is Lifter LMS. You’re an expert on Lifter. We love Lifter, we love LearnDash, and we love Lifter LMS at WP tonic. Where would you start the conversation with Lifter LMS?
[00:39:38.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, with Lifter LMS, it comes with the membership student management tools and the learning content tools in the free core plugin. And so when it comes like when your question was from an internal learning perspective, how would you have that conversation? I think it would be like, hey, you You can try this for free. You’ve already got a WordPress website. We could put this free core version in. It’s going to give you the ability to manage and assign students, have the courses. Because of the way that the membership tools work, I’m able to assign students or auto-enroll students in groups of courses as packages. So let’s say somebody, I don’t know, takes a certain course load. They could say, oh, I signed up for this track, this course track. You could have that course track actually be in a membership and then auto enroll those courses right away. And so to me, I just think from the free core version, I get a little bit more bang for the the luck and the idea that it’s a free core version. They get to try it, experiment with it, put their content into it and get used to it before they make that that commitment of having purchased something on a timeline.
[00:41:03.400] – Jonathan Denwood
If you had to choose from the SaaS list, is there one or two that you would choose? If somebody was asking you, it’s got to be a SaaS solution, Kurt, and which one would you choose, Kurt?
[00:41:25.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, there’s one that we didn’t mention that I have some experience with. It’s called Bridge. Bridge, LMS, and that’s good user interface, all that stuff. But realistically, out of the ones that we discussed, I’d probably lean towards talent LMS.
[00:41:44.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the two, it would either be Talent LMS or it would be Canvas, depending on the organization. But I do like Talent LMS. Xorba LMS, obviously, they’ve got the AI, they’re playing hard, and it’s interesting. But I do like the pricing structure from Talent. Another one that I didn’t add to the list, but it’s similar I know what we said about Lifter LMS. It can do both, but it’s one I like quite a lot, is Learnworlds, because they do offer a lot. I wouldn’t go with the basic plan because I wouldn’t say it’s crippled, but there’s some parts of it that I wouldn’t recommend, but they got a next plan up. But I do like Learn worlds. But because we were talking about higher education, I had to set some boundaries, but I do like learn worlds. If you want to outside a black have a look at learn worlds. But in general, in the SaaS world, I personally would look at talent LMS. I totally agree with you.
[00:43:11.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and there’s different reasons for all these things. For instance, learn upon is one that I have recent experience with. And you get these weird dashboards that pop up for different things. You got to click this, get a dashboard, click this, get a dashboard, then upload your SCORM content, then upload your text sister content to it, and then upload this module. And when you’re doing this, you’re completely removed from what the user experience is. You have no idea what it’s going to look like in the front of the website. None. You’re just filling in fields in the back-end, and then you got to go to the front-end to see, Well, what does this even look like? And I feel like talent LMS bridges that gap a little bit better when we’re talking about these other SaaS platforms. It’s more intuitive the way that loading the content in versus what you see on the front-end. It just feels smoother. The user experience for the creator and for the student is just a little cleaner than some of the things that I’ve experienced elsewhere.
[00:44:13.220] – Jonathan Denwood
When it comes to the open source and WordPress, which one would you recommend?
[00:44:19.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I do have to admit, Jonathan. We talk about Lifter LMS quite a bit, and people are going to think that I’m on the take. I really like Lifter, but it’s the majority of the work that I do in the eLearning space now. Between Lifter LMS and LearnDash, there is absolutely no reason for me, especially if it’s my wallet, to look at any of these SaaS platforms, because when you’re in the WordPress space, you don’t just get the benefit of the LMS. Now you have an LMS surrounded by a complete CMS, so you can have static pages, you can put community in there, you can have a CRM working in the background. I mean, you can really apply yourself and make a real kick ass learning platform in the WordPress space, a lot more so than what I’m going to get. Like even in the Moodle space. There’s a ton of add-ons in the Moodle space. But when you try to build it and put it together, you end up being like a quasi developer to make it happen. Whereas I feel like in the WordPress space, things are a little more intuitive. That’s all.
[00:45:28.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
So for me, it be between learn LearnDash and Lifter LMS. And when it comes down to any memberships or bundling courses together or putting packages together, I’m always going to go the Lifter LMS way just because I believe their way is a lot simpler. In putting those deals together than it is with LearnDash.
[00:45:47.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally agree with you. The thing I would add is that I don’t think for internal training, I think WordPress is a fantastic solution because of ease of use. It drives 43 to 45% of all websites people have used it. They’ve probably used it for their own websites. They know how to use the back-end. I probably would still go with Lifter Lifter LMS, just for the support, just for the quality of support you’re going to get all the things that the Lifter LMS team does online around support and training and just the culture of the company. It’s not I have to say that the LearnDash team are bad because I know them as well, and they’re a very good team and it’s a good product. It’s great value. Obviously, Lifter LMS start is free the core, but what you get… But they’re both excellent value. But it’s just the support and the culture at Lifter LMS, which I think is some of the best in the market. So- Well, just one more thing to touch on before we really lose focus on how we talked about things today.
[00:47:12.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
When you mentioned the pricing for Canvas, Canvas was the one that was five dollars per month per student, right? Was that the one? So I have a thousand students, that’s five thousand dollars a month.
[00:47:27.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:47:28.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
That is the whole reason that I ended up in the WordPress space. So when people look at me now and I do all these different shows and I have all these opinions, it’s, how did he get here, right? If I have all this eLearning experience from the corporate world, how did I get here? I got here because I watched companies stroke checks for a quarter million, $400,000 a year in some cases for learning management websites that were horrible, that didn’t function well, that people hated. And I knew that we could build something better in WordPress. And then we have conversations about, well, $199 a year for LearnDash. That’s not even a consideration for people that are thinking $5 per learner per month.
[00:48:09.100] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a little bit because you do need to find our agency, W WP tonic. You need to find our agency, and there’s about three or four in the e-learning space. I’m trying to give WP tonic, because it’s seen as one of those four. You do need an agency that’s got experience in that area to provide the support on top of whatever Lifter or LearnDash provides and can be your partner, but it’ll still be enormously more cost-effective than some of these corporate solutions. And you got much more ownership, IP, intellectual property ownership and design ownership. I think one of the other factors, just to finish, I just want to get your opinion, is that AI, I think when it comes to Scorm and providing these integrated packages like SCORM where you have the animation and in one wrap-up, I really think with AI developing the days of these wrap-up solutions for education, I can see the writing on the wall, really. Would you agree with that or do you think I might be wrong about that? It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?
[00:49:41.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
I hesitate to say the writing’s on the wall for one very simple thing, and people listening to this might get hurt by what I say. I don’t mean any malice in this at all. However, when I speak with learning professionals in the corporate and higher education sectors, they describe curriculum as if it’s a complex, advanced, futuristic realm of concepts. And when you do the search on SCORM and when it was developed and when it was last updated, you’re like, oh, my goodness, these people are running around on 20-year-old technology talking about how advanced they are. There’s a dichotomy in what’s happening. When you say, oh, AI does this, I could see this go in the other direction, I don’t know.
[00:50:29.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. I’ve been amazed at how long it’s been able to keep going, but for the reason you’ve so well put it. But I think AI will be the death of it. I hope so because it’s hard.
[00:50:49.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Or maybe they will finally update it and utilize AI, making it something amazing. Not for nothing. I went to Skills USA a couple of seasons ago, and Yamaha had a complete setup with virtual reality learning, complete with goggles and headsets. The guys were working on imaginary motorcycles and cars. And it’s like, talk about the coolest thing ever, straight out of the movies. However, by the time, just like everything else, when you look at what it costs to create a course in that environment, it’s not yet financially feasible.
[00:51:24.600] – Jonathan Denwood
No, but that’s why I think AI, because it will blow all out of reality. However, I think the early days of the internet were blown out of proportion, and it took much longer, and the process was much more gradual. However, I do think the cost of creating high-quality training materials will become more reasonable, and it will also become a lot easier and more cost-effective. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kurt?
[00:52:05.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve been trying my best to keep up with my LinkedIn. I’ll be honest, it’s becoming a challenge. But I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, so for a person-to-person connection, that’s probably one of the best ways to do it. Then, if it’s for business, I am at Mañana Nomas.
[00:52:20.680] – Jonathan Denwood
If you found value in this particular podcast and the other episodes of the Membership Machine Show, I have to ask you: if you’re on your phone and listening on iTunes or Spotify, could you please leave us a review? It really does help the show, and it also helps with our ranking in the membership eLearning space. If you could do that, both Kirk and I would be very appreciative. It’s really dead easy to leave a review on the app, on iTunes, or on Spotify. You can simply scroll down; it’s right in front of you. And if you could do that, we would be, both of us, very appreciative. We will be back next week with information to share with you to make your membership business a success or your eLearning more effective. We will be back soon, folks. Bye. All right.
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