Hosted eLearning providers - recommendations pleas...

A client is looking for a hosted eLearning provider. In essence, the service required will:

1) Provide self-paced learning of a course over a period of time

2) Provide an exam to be taken at the end, with results reporting

3) Be robust and high availability - mirrored servers, DR

4) Provide customer activity reporting to the course provider (my client)

5) Provide help-desk facilities to the end course user for technical issues arising with the use of the course.

Does anybody have any experience of such providers, please?

Many thanks

Jim

Hi Jim,

you could try http://www.canstudios.com/about.html

although they are not a member of 4n, so you may wish to see if you get a response off the forum.

Regards

Where they wanting the course written as well, or are they doing that in house and simply looking for the platform? and what sort of course will it be (subject area)

Liz, thanks, I don't know exactly. They are a marketing communications company, and do a lot of web to print so the course subject will be somewhere in those areas, I think. They will be writing the course material. Jim

Pam Jones from Eight Interactive is a 4N member and is also a client of ours. This sounds right up her street. Ill poke her towards this thread as well.

Hi Jim

Olly pointed me to this discussion.

On the hosting side, what your client needs is a Learning Management Systems (LMS) which tracks and records data in the way you describe. There are a whole host of LMS out there; in fact a recent industry report stated that there over 200 LMS and 75 Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) on the market. One of the most popular and highly rated LMS by the industry includes Moodle (www.moodle.org) – which is open source so very cost effective for organisations new in e-learning or looking for a quick/cost effective deployment. The LMS can then be hosted on client's own server or through hosting company. Its very flexible, customisable and robust. Best of all... its FREE!

My business designs and develops elearning content in any subject and has direct experience of developing marketing related e-learning courses. So if your client wanted help in this area, I would be happy to discuss further. We don't provide a service to host the elearning - but again there are many companies out there that do. So specialise in hosting for specific LMS. For example http://www.synergy-learning.com/ provide hosting packages for Moodle only. I don't have any experience of working with them so not able to "recommend" as such.

Hope this helps. Do get in touch if want to chat further about this.

Regards

Pam

Pam

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'll certainly include you in my thoughts when I go back to the client. The course content is training material, by the way, and there will be more than one language.

Jim

Jim - how many users are you talking about and what is the "race ready" nature of the material ? - Is it ready to do or does it need converting ?

Thanks

Don't know how many end customers they envisage, but could ask. Likewise about the material. I guess it is ready but unlikely to be in the required format, depending on the package that is decided on to run the system.

Hi Jim,

A client of mine provides management resources to organisations such as Audi. He has done a lot of work on e-learning systems and may be able to tell you the pros and cons of several of them. I've evaluated a couple of systems during my career and know that they can be very costly and time consuming for the uninitiated to design and implement a good programme. I'm sorry I can't remember the names of any of the programs I evaluated although I agree with Pam that Moogle is a good one to use (for the reasons she's already stated).

If you want to contact my client he's not a 4N member but I'm sure he would be glad to give you some advice. I can give you an introduction to him if you like. He's based in MK so not too far away from you.

Thanks, Teresa. That would be useful. Jim

Hi Jim,

Sorry for the late reply to this thread, but I’m relatively new to 4N so only just read your post.

My company is a software development company that specialises in online eLearning.

We have the facilities to take classroom materials and get ready to go online at a relatively low cost.

We also offer full hosting and support services on our own LMS which is built on Moodle.

As for the 5 points that you mentioned in the top of you post I can happily tick all those boxes and include a 24 hour server snapshot of your virtualised servers for DR.

If you require mirroring for high availability we can also offer that, although with most of our clients 24 hour backup cycle is sufficient due to costs.

Thanks, Mark

A bit late for that enquiry, but good to know.  Jim