For those who consider themselves as new to LMS, we would like to shed some light on the meaning under the abbreviation LMS. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software through which you can deliver learning content and resources to students, manage trainings, monitor students participation and assess their performance. LMS is very often used by large enterprises for their employees within the organization in order to monitor the effectiveness of company education and trainings. You can use various tools for organizing the online learning environment of your website, such as: competency management, certifications, succession planning, skills-gap analysis, virtual live classes and resource allocation (venues, rooms, textbooks, instructors, etc.). Students on your LMS web site are enabled to use interactive features such as threaded discussions, discussion forums and video conferencing.

Find below the table showing some of the main tools/ features that an LMS should offer. If the box is empty, that means that the feature is either not offered at the moment or it is in “coming soon” status. For further
detailed information on the functionality/ addons provided by these applications, please refer to the links
given below – we are sure you will find them helpful when making your mind which LMS application is the right for you.

This table compares the features of one of the most popular LMS applications (Moodle, Doceos, Atutor, Claroline, Docebo and JoomlaLMS). Still, you can review some other e-learning solutions on our LMS Hosting page.

In case you are not sure which one to choose, start with the one that offers the greatest number of features you need for your project. Then in time, if you feel this is not the right LMS application for you, you can change it with another one. At TMDHosting all that applications are provided with a pack of free services such as: Free installation and configuration, Free module installation, Free theme change. For more information on our LMS hosting services, feel free to contact us at anytime.

Have you ever thought to make a website that would help your classmates and professors keep track of lectures, homework and curriculum activities? If this sounds boring to you let me explain how to turn your web page into the coolest and most visited site your school has ever had.

First and most important element about your community website is your content. Web content consists of all documents, data, applications, images, audio and video files that you publish on your web page. It is crucial that you update regularly your website content and publish information that is interesting to your readers. For example, if you are building an academic website you can speak to your teacher about his/hers lectures and ask permission to publish them online, where everyone can read them at home. You can also find out which are your classmates’ favorite books, games, and movies and ask them to write short reviews. Or you can start up a competition and publish the best school essays so everyone can log in, read them and vote. The best ideas about your website content you will find around yourself by asking friends what they like to read and learn more about. Your content is also a key element of your web page because search engines can index text easily and if the information is close to what a searcher is seeking it can be delivered as a site for the seeker of information. This will eventually result into growing number of visits to your site and high search engine ranking.

Secondly, you can place a news page. In order to do that you have to be an excellent reporter. A professional reporter is someone who splits his/her time between working in a newsroom – writing news – and going out to witness events and interview people. Imagine yourself writing news about upcoming events, interviews with professors and school mates, small articles about your community, life at school or in the city where your school is. This type of information you will find from your school’s administration, in the local newspaper or simply by talking to your friends at school. Once you start a news column, however, you have to update it regularly. Soon you will find out that your schoolmates read the news section frequently and you cannot afford to stop publishing more and more interesting news. Later on you can even offer your readers the option to subscribe to your website and receive newsletters by email. A newsletter is an extremely powerful tool when you need to spread the word instantly to a large number of people.

Thirdly, you can include a calendar of events on your community website. In this section you can write about exam schedule, mid-term test, or school program. Most importantly, you have to include all sorts of extra curriculum activities such as day trips, holidays, sport events, city concerts, school carnivals, music festivals, art exhibitions, science meetings, and anything else that takes place in your community and is of interest to your audience. If you spend enough time on this section and update it often it will soon become the most trusted event calendar your school has ever published.

Furthermore, you can create a web forum on your site. An Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards or simply forums. Web forums have become so popular among online communities that nowadays it is impossible to imagine a community website without a forum. If you manage to gather enough readers to your website soon your forum will become its most visited and read section. As an administrator of your forum you can invite friends to comment on different subjects, discuss interesting topics and share personal views about school life or anything else. Web forum is a lot of fun because it gives everyone the opportunity to give an opinion in a friendly and real-time environment.

Finally, on your community website you can upload your favored photo albums, videos and images so everyone can see them. You can divide your images into different categories: let’s say summer holidays, school trips, sport events, city landscapes, favorite images and many more. Do not forget to write captions to your images. A caption is a short and descriptive piece of text that labels your picture. You can also include the date and place where the image was taken. By doing this everyone who visits your gallery will know when and where the picture was taken. Very often people like to comment on pictures and soon your web gallery will turn into a mini-forum with funny comments.

All the above can be easily achieved with the help of the moder open source systems. For example, if you decide to build a e-learning website where you would like to include online courses and study materials you may relay on one of the most popular e-learning systems (LMS applications):

Moodle

Moodle is a learning management system (LMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 250,000 students.

Atutor

ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, develop custom themes to give ATutor a new look, and easily extend its functionality with feature modules. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment.

Dokeos

Dokeos is a learning suite that allows you create, organise, follow and coach learning activities. Here is a quick preview. For a demo, register as a course creator in Dokeos Free Campus.

… and many more from our LMS hosting solutions list

You can also use a Content management system such as Joomla for your informative/news front end of your website and Gallery application for your academy gallery website.

If you are not sure how exactly to organize your website and which applications to use or where you can host your website, you can always consult with our friendly and experienced representatives.