Comparativo entre Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Quesitos analisados pelo EduTech da Suíça:

Aspectos gerais

Capacidade multilíngüe

Ambiente do estudantes

Facilidade de uso

Cumprimento a padrões de tecnologia Web

Ambiente funcional

Didática e tutoria

Facilidade de uso

Comunicação

Gerenciamento de estudantes

Monitoramento de atividades

Desenvolvimento de cursos

Facilidade de uso

Ambiente de desenvolvimento flexível

Suporte ao desenvolvimento

Compatibilidade com ferramentas de autoria Web

Avaliações

Suporte a padrões do ensino online

Aparência adaptável

Sistema e administração

Gerencimento do sistema

Administração

Tabela comparativa de LMS disponíveis no Brasil

Quesito	dotLRN 2.2	Moodle 1.5.2	AulaNet	WebAula	WebEnsino	IntraLearn	Teleduc
Características dos Produtos	OpenACS consortium: http://dotlrn.org/ Started at MIT, now a non-profit consortium with members at a number of universities and companies around the world. Members pay a fee to participate in the OpenACS consortium, but anybody who fulfills the requirements can become certified and contribute. Last major evaluation update: September 2005 About product Based on OpenACS (an open source toolkit), dotLRN consists of a set of components that are certified by the dotLRN consortium to be dotLRN compliant. About producer Started at MIT, now a non-profit consortium with members at a number of universities and companies around the world. Members pay a fee to participate in the OpenACS consortium, but anybody who fulfills the requirements can become certified and contribute. Strengths Strong on collaboration and community learning through a number of nice features such as RSS feeds, email and SMS notification, survey, IM chat, polling, blog and FAQ. Also offers most current functions such as homework drop box, assessment, content organisation and Scorm display. Advanced features include export of student tracking data and exchange of learning objects (entire course or just parts). Weaknesses The platform is a combination of OpenACS modules from different developers from different phases of development, which results in a heterogenious interface and inconsistent quality. Content presentation is distributed over 3 different tools, which makes it difficult to find some of the more powerful features. Some modules have context sensitive help, some not. Not all modules are available in all languages.	Martin Dougiamas and open-source community: http://www.moodle.org Martin Dougiamas is the originator, lead developer, project manager and release manager of Moodle, present on moodle.org since 2002. Moodle.com was launched in 2003 to offer commercial service by Moodle Partners (Swiss Moodle Partner: mediagonal AG, Fribourg). Last major evaluation update: August 2005 About product Available since 2002, Moodle is provided freely under the GNU Public License. It was developed based on a pedagogical philosophy (social constructivist). Moodle can be installed on any web server with a php interpreter and fully supports using mySQL or postgreSQL databases. About producer Martin Dougiamas is the originator, lead developer, project manager and release manager of Moodle, present on moodle.org since 2002. Moodle.com was launched in 2003 to offer commercial service by Moodle Partners (Swiss Moodle Partner: mediagonal AG, Fribourg). Strengths Moodle has a pleasant interface, making it easy to understand and get started quickly. One can set up a simple course (content pages, forum, quizzes) relatively quickly, yet Moodle offers other more advanced activities as well (such as Wiki, Assignments, Glossary, Survey, Lesson, etc.). Even with these additional options, the interface remains clean, uncluttered and pleasant to use. The Moodle user community is quite active, as seen in the forums on moodle.org. Weaknesses The documentation (Teacher's Manual) gets you started with simple features quickly, but some more advanced features are not quite as well documented and may require a search at moodle.org forums to find information.					
Aspectos Gerais
Capacidade multilingüe Two aspects : 1. The interface language can be changed by the authors and/or the students. 2. One course can be offered in different translations (this feature is not available in many platforms!).	English, German, French, Spanish is availble. An editor that allows easy addition of other languages is provided. Only certain modules are available in Italian. The German version has some strange translations.	The Moodle interface is available in many languages, including French, Italian and German. Users can choose their preferred language for the navigation interface. Moodle also offers the possibility to create multilingual content for resources that are edited within Moodle (text, html). It takes a bit more effort when editing, but is not too complicated to accomplish. (For any multilingual text, one enters the text in both languages, separating them out with special markers.)					
Ambiente do estudante
Facilidade de uso The students can use the environment like common web pages: page URLs can be bookmarked, copied and pasted to email messages and used by fellow students. Other common browser functions are supported: print current page, save page on local disk, find word in current page.	dotLRN is easy to use. Students can use dotLRN mostly in the same way as common web pages but should not trust the common browser functions to always work properly. Page reload and bookmarking do not always work correctly.	Generally very easy to use and navigate.					
Segue padrões aceitos de tecnologia Web The platform is compatible with common browsers (Netscape, Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla) on common operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, Linux. (Linux not tested).	Yes, commonly used browsers are supported.	No apparent problems on Windows Firefox 1.0.4.0, Windows Internet Explorer 6.0.2 or Macintosh Safari 1.3					
Ambiente funcional	Many tools that are especially useful for collaboration are provided: RSS feeds, email and SMS notification, survey, polling, blog, FAQ, IM chat and synchronization of calendar events with Microsoft Outlook calendars. Context sensitive help is only implemented in some of the modules, the assessment tool has few exercise types.	Navigation is mostly straight forward. Student can easily set language and visibility of elements. Breadcrumbs are not always intuitive, since links to a resource have a path that shows the type of activity instead of the part of the course the resource is located in. (For example, Moodle shows Main Course > Forums > A Specific Forum instead of Main Course > Topic 6 > A Specific Forum)					
Didática e tutoria
Facilidade de uso Tutors are typically advanced students, teaching assistants or – more rarely – professors. They might have attended an introductory, didactically focused course on online tutoring. They don't have much time to get used to a platform, but they still should be able to quickly handle its basic tutoring tools: communications, announcements, students subscriptions, group management, tracking data evaluation and quiz results evaluation.	The user interface for students is quite easy to learn and understand quickly. It is less easy for teachers, although a number of tools such as news, FAQ, groups, forum and the calendar do help to rapidly set up a course. Some functions, however, are difficult to find and not always where you would expect to find them. The student tracking and the number of exercise generators provided in the assessment are quite limited.	The different options available for creating and managing a course are mostly very straight forward. What is not described well in the Teacher's Manual has to be learned at the moodle.org forums, or gleaned from the examples provided with the Demo course.					
Comunicação The platform focuses on asynchronous communications, mainly threaded discussion forums. The system also features asynchronous teamworking tools with document exchange facilities. It furthermore allows the tutor to define in a flexible way collaborative working tasks and groups.	The platform clearly has been developed with community learning in mind. Many communication tools (news, RSS feeds, IM chat, subscription to alert mails, etc.) have current functions allowing individual and groups to work comfortably together. A mailing system is not integrated (bulk mail is provided). A flexible rights management system allows students to create their own groups and forums.	Forums are a mainstay of Moodle. There are 3 different types of forums: standard open forum, one topic per user forums and single-topic forum (like news). Groups can be formed, yet determine only the visibility for a course or an activity (whether or not one group can view another group's work). Document upload and download is possible. A wiki could be used for collaborative work on a text (as long as the editing were timed well enough to make sure group members didn't write over eachother's contributions).					
Gerenciamento de estudantes The platform allows complementary ways to enroll students: enrollment by tutor with web-interface, upload of student lists, by the administrator (and less importantly, self enrollment). The same holds for the definition of working groups.	Yes, there are several ways to enroll students: interface to IMS Enterprise, load students from an LDAP directory, lists in CSV format.	A teacher can enroll students that are already in the system in their course. Administrators can use file upload to enroll students in courses and in groups. Self enrollment by students is possible. The new meta-course feature allows easier enrollment of the same students in several different courses.					
Monitoramento de atividades The platform generates useful reports about the activity of students in the course, the quizzes and the communication tools. The purpose of the reports is to give the tutor a didactically relevant feeling of what happens in a course.	Tracking and reporting is rather limited, but some feedback is provided.	Logs and activity reports offer possibilities that are easily accessible. The course can be monitored rather closely, if desired, or just checked occasionally.					
Desenvolvimento de cursos
Facilidade de uso Authors are experts of the course domain. They usually are highly motivated, experienced web users, but only have basic web authoring skills. On one hand, the platform should enable the authors to efficiently develop a course structure along with its content, and on the other hand support them in being compliant with technical, didactical and usability standards; in other words, it should prevent them from making severe errors. The platform offers a generic default course organization and navigation scheme. It is therefore easy to develop content out-of-the-box in an efficient way.	dotLRN provides very many functions and tools, but does not really help guide the teachers and developers with structuring tools and wizards. It's 'hidden' curriculum favors cooperative learning over text reading and can be set up quickly to accompany a face to face course. Creating a more complete learning environment requires several training workshops.	Moodle offers 3 models of course structure that are quickly recognized: by week, by topic or social. Adapting one or the other model is not complicated. The weekly and topical structures resemble the syllabus approach; the social model is more like a seminar, as it is based solely on discussion as the main structuring element.					
Ambiente de desenvolvimento flexível. Experienced power-authors can go beyond default functionalities. They can program dynamic pages (using server-side scripting), connect them to databases and access platform functions with a documented API.	Yes, server side scripting (PHP, ASP, ColdFusion and also exchange with SOAP and XML RPC), connecting to databases. An API is available: http://demo.cognovis.de:8030/api-doc/	Adding functionality to Moodle is possible and encouraged. Links to external, dynamically generated pages work within Moodle. A formal API doesn't seem to be complete; rather, the Developer's Manual provides a template for activity modules, with instructions in a readme file. A resource named Core API exists, but is not yet complete.					
Suporte ao desenvolvimento Documentation is available. The platform producer runs a website that includes a “developers corner” with discussion forums and rich information (guides, tutorials, references). The producer promptly answers support requests and bug reports.	Well documented developers community site for the core system OpenACS: http://openacs.org/doc/. The dotLRN subgroup is much less well documented.	The Moodle community is large and active. The main developer is quite present in the forums at moodle.org. Documentation is pretty good, though not complete. Documentation includes a Student Manual, a Teacher Manual and a Developer Manual, though they are not always up to date.					
Compatibilidade com ferramentas de autoria Web The platform is compatible with standard web authoring tools like GoLive or Dreamweaver. Content can be up-/downloaded via FTP or WebDAV for collaborative authoring or with similar methods.	Yes to all	HTML pages or other files can be uploaded from within Moodle only, or linked from Moodle and displayed either in a pop-up window or in a frame. WebDAV is not yet implemented. Style sheets are used throughout.					
Avaliações	Not many different test types, mainly multiple choice questions and surveys.	Many quiz types are available from within Moodle. You can create questions with the built-in quiz editor. Questions can be read from a text file, in several different formats (including questions created from WebCT and Blackboard), plus a module for importing HotPotatoes Quizzes is available.					
Suporte para padrões de ensino online Among the many upcoming standards for e-learning, the IMS and SCORM standards suite are apparently widely accepted in higher education circles. The most important parts are IMS/SCORM-CP, SCORM-RTI and IMS-QTI. With data standards, implementations should support import and export. Also important is IEEE-LOM or IMS-metadata support. The main purpose of using standards is reusability and interoperability.	SCORM as well as IMS CP is supported (single pages of imported SCORM packages can be edited inside dotLRN). IMS-QTI is used to exchange assessments.	Moodle includes a module for uploading SCORM packages (.zip files) that simplifies the upload/unzip process. The uploaded scorm's structure is displayed next to the content, which is opened in an iframe. The version 1.5 release notes state that the SCORM module is now fully conformant with the SCORM 1.2 standard. Quizzes can be exported to IMS QTI 2.0.					
Aparência adaptável It should be possible to customize the general appearance of the course platform: it would provide a default layout that could be adapted by each institution and/or each course, if desired. In the simplest case, it could use cascading stylesheets to achieve this: a global default stylesheet can be partially overridden by an institutional stylesheet which can itself be partially overridden by a course-specific stylesheet.	For the teacher/developer adapting the layout of the interface is limited to changing some colors, turning on or off some tools and moving links up or down. Logos and style sheets can be only be changed at the server level by specialists. At the server level, multiple, differently branded institutions are possible. The "ETP" tool (Edit this page) is hard to find, yet allows the experienced developer to more adapt the general appearance of the courses' main pages more completely.	The overall look and feel can be changed using what Moodle calls themes. Logos can be added, and style sheets modified to make minor changes easily. Individual courses can have their own themes that differ from the entry page or from site level theme. Styles can be changed at the course element level also, as these use style sheets too. Users can also choose their preferred theme if the site has been configured to allow it.					
Sistema & Administração
Gerenciamento do sistema	A large installation can use one database computer (PostgreSQL, Oracle) with two web servers for loadbalancing.	Installation is not difficult. Moodle can apparently be used for large institutions (40,000 students). The latest version offers an https login page.					
Administração	One installation of dotLRN cannot serve several institutions. Since OpenACS is prepared for this, very little is needed to improve dotLRN in that direction. Authentication modes: Unix Pluggable Authentication Modules allowing (PAM RADIUS, Kerberos, IMAP, POP, AFS, etc.) and LDAP. The external authentication infrastructure is modular so that additional authentication drivers can be easily added.	One server - multiple institutions is not a default option. However, it can be done without too much work. Moodle has been shibbolized for use with Switch AAI login.					

Bibliografia

Evaluation of Open Source Learning Management Systems – 2005. Site Web em http://www.edutech.ch/lms/ev3/index.php. Acesso em 5 dez. 2005.

Comparativo entre Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

LMS Learning Management System education

Trabalho desenvolvido por Prof. MS. José Antonio Meira da Rocha durante o curso de Avaliação de Learning Management Systems (LMS) do professor Wilson Azevedo.

José Antonio Miera da Rocha

2005-12-05T01:04:09