Best Opensource LMS (Learning) Apps for Websites and their Features

Canvas

Canvas LMS is an open source course management application. Initially released in 2011, Canvas LMS is used by more than 3 thousand universities, school districts, and institutions.

Canvas is the LMS that makes teaching and learning (and implementation and adoption and customer support and student success and bragging to your non-Canvas-using peers) easier.

Features:

• Openness: Canvas is openness—from our open APIs to the openness of our security audits, from our open feature discussions and Canvas Studio to the open source software that is Canvas itself.
• Customizability: Canvas provides an extensive, open API that we publish to the world, making it easy for third-party apps to plug right into Canvas, pull from its data, and push data back in.
• Pedagogical Flexibility: We built a whole app center just to make it even easier for institutions and instructors to experiment and adapt new technologies into their courses. Browse through loads of LTI apps and install them in a single click. No IT support necessary.
• Support: Who knows Canvas better than Canvas? Our in-house Canvas experts take the support burden off your hands, ensuring the speediest, most frictionless interactions.

Chamilo

Chamilo is an open source course management application. Forked from Dokeos in 2010, Chamilo is currently used by more than 3.5 million students and teachers.

Chamilo aims at bringing you the best e-learning and collaboration platform in the open source world. Chamilo is also a brand owned by the Chamilo Association, which makes it possible for many companies to build on the name of the product with very low risk. The trademark is not and will never be owned by a single trademark holder.

Features:

• Easy creation of educational content
• Tracking of users results, allowing for methodology improvements
• Clean interface, letting user focus on learning
• Synchronous and asynchronous communication channels
• Many tools allowing for all learning types (visual, auditive, practical, serious games, staff selection)
• Extensive documents management capabilities

Moodle

Moodle is an open source course management application. Initially released in 2002, Moodle serves more than 63 million users and 1.2 million teachers between 70,000 registered websites.

Moodle is a course management application designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

eFront

eFront is an open source learning management application. Initially released in 2007, eFront received the 2012 Best Open Source Solution award by Elearning! Magazine.

eFront is a robust learning platform, bundled with key enterprise functionality ranging from branch management to tailor-made reports. We have worked with hundreds of organizations to shape a product that meets the training needs of modern enterprises.

Enterprise features include:

• Organization structure management
• Skills management
• Job positions management
• Automatic assignment of courses to specific job descriptions
• Skills gap tests management
• User card with training history
• LDAP support

eFront also has a number of features typically found in eLearning platforms:

• User management
• Lessons, courses, curriculum and categories management
• Files management
• Exam builders
• Assignments builders
• Communication tools (forum, chat, calendar, glossary)
• Progress tracking
• Authentication methods
• Enrollment methods
• Certifications
• Reports generators
• Extensibility via modules
• Payments integration (through PayPal)
• Social tools (lesson and system history, user wall, user status, Facebook interconnection)
• Customizable notification system through email
• Themes

Opigno

Opigno is an Open Source e-learning platform based on Drupal that allows  you to manage your online trainings, and efficiently ensure that student, employee and partner skills remain up to date.

Opigno LMS is designed for Companies, Corporations and Universities, looking for an e-learning solution that is flexible and is easily scalable.

ROLES MANAGEMENT

• Flexible access control, based on roles.
• Default roles include: student, teacher, class’ coach, content manager, user manager, and administrator.
• Add as many as you want, using fine-grained control over what each role can do (or not) on the platform.

TRAINING MANAGEMENT

• Training catalogue with public/private trainings
• Online training management (theory / quiz modules)
• Intructor-led sessions management
• Virtual classroom sessions management
• Adaptative learning path management, where training materials will be adapted to every student according to his/her previous achievements and some conditional rules
• Guided training creation wizard
• Graphical learning path manager tool
• Fine-grained content management inside trainings, with courses, modules, and activities
• Rich and powerful content authoring tool, allowing to create interactive and engaging contents
• Training prerequisites: make your students finish one training before getting access to the next one, or use entrance test for trainings
• Automatic PDF certificates generation when successfully completing a training.

ILIAS

Around since 1998, ILIAS is a powerful learning management system that fulfils all your requirements. Using its integrated tools, small and large businesses, universities, schools and public authorities are able to create tailored, individual learning scenarios.

Anyone can use ILIAS – free of cost – and also take part in shaping its further development.

Repository
Structure your learning resources. Define roles and permissions to control access. Have a look at our scenario examples for schools, universities and companies.

Personal Desktop
Access your courses and groups quickly. Manage your mail, notes, calendar, profile and privacy settings.

Course Management
Create courses, manage members, provide resources, use the calendar and more.

Groups
Foster collaboration between your users using groups.

Content Management
Create learning modules and glossaries. Use our SCORM 1.2 and 2004 certified run-time-environment and SCORM editor. Edit and re-use style sheets.

Booking Tool
Manage consultations hours and the booking of various resources.

Wiki
Develop knowledge collaboratively and easily.

Discussion Forum
Discuss in forums using a WYSIWYG editor and attachments.

Test & Assessment
Use tests to assess the learning outcome of your users. Re-use questions from question pools and perform online exams.

Survey
Use surveys to evaluate your e-learning.

Forma Lms

Forma Lms is an award-winning Learning Management System, used to manage and deliver online training courses.
Designed for corporate training, born to fit your company needs and processess.

Easy integration with any intranet software, extend functionalities with a wide range of plugins.

Forma is developed by a network of companies, with a strong and active community:

it’s open-source, and it’s FREE.

Specifically designed for the ease of use of students and teachers, with a modern and responsive layout. 

Manage many different training materials: scorm multimedia, html pages, embed videos… and create powerful assessments directly with the built in functionalities managing scores and prerequisites.

Integrate with your videoconferencing system to create your webinars.

SAKAI

Sakai provides a wealth of powerful, flexible tools that enable great teaching, compelling learning, and dynamic collaboration. An independent research firm found that these tools out-performed those in other LMS platforms.

Sakai’s user interface is modern, easy to use, and accessible.  Thanks to Sakai’s responsive design, instructors and students can achieve their academic goals no matter where they are or what device they use.

Powerful course and system administration features give you the tools to manage courses and users effectively and efficiently. Sakai’s highly configurable system of roles and permissions lets you customize the platform to match your business processes.

State of the art grading and assessment features make Sakai a great choice for collecting student submissions and providing rich feedback on their work. Whether it is high stakes testing, online assignments, rubric-based scoring, or fast, easy grade-entry capabilities, Sakai’s got you covered.

OpenOlat

Learning is always at the center of a learning management system. OpenOLAT provides students with many possibilities to improve their learning experience. The system can be tailored to the needs of learners, and meets the requirements of pupils, students, and employees. Authors have the possibility to create courses that suit their target audience, for example with a course that includes folders for exchanging data, or with included SCORM modules.

OpenOLAT users can:

• Create groups and invite fellow learners
• Create courses and run exams
• Adjust personal settings
• Contact other users via email, forums, chat, and even virtual classrooms

Collaboration – Studying alone can make sense. But very often, learning matter can be memorized more effectively when exchanging ideas with other students. With the OpenOLAT tools, collaborative techniques can be applied in didactically important places.

Tests – Whether you want to do assessments, self tests, or surveys, the OpenOLAT test editor provides you with the necessary features. The editor allows you to create questions online, no extra tools are needed. Graphical adjustments are made easy when creating tests with the editor. Even pictures and movies can be added.

Course creation – The course editor is the most powerful tool in OpenOLAT. The online tool is capable of implementing any didactic concept. Free of predefined structures, courses are adjustable at will, for example with only a simple storage folder, or as a deeply nested construct including all of the available course elements.