As some of you no doubt know, here at ODE, we have been playing with the idea of using a Learning Management System to work with some of our on-line content. Over the years we have tested, mostly behind the scenes, a number of packages and SaaS providers. Until LearnDash – Learning Management Software based in WordPress – appeared, we did not find a good fit.

The leader, Moodle, has a lot of things that are not needed in a firm like ODE (we are not planning on using assessments for example, and the social media elements we found to be quite weak). In our view, to be honest, it also suffers from a very poor user interface, unless you are ready to dive in deep and make lots of changes.

We have tested others, whose names we will not print, and we found software that sometimes was badly translated from another language, and /or was not documented and/or was  just not robust enough for on-line use. So we stopped looking for a solution and sat with long faces. We needed something simple but rich in scope – with a payment engine, good media support, skinning, good social media options. Not many things fit that bill.

Recently however, we started our search again, and finally, somebody has decided to design a tool that is simple, powerful and that makes sense – An LMS as a plug-in for WordPress. There are many good points in favour of this idea:

• Users and Groups? check!
• Lots of Themes? check!
• Good media support? check!
• Robust, tried and tested? check!
• Great SEO? check!

LearnDash Learning Management

LearnDash is the name of the WordPress Learning Management System we will be testing. If you are in the eLearning field, love WordPress and want to look into a nice way of working with content for eLearning, go and have a read! It is slated to be come out in January 2013 and is full of the features that we hope to use. We look forward to testing it in the near future.