Category: lms

How community engagement platforms are moving in on the workplace learning market

Numerous research studies show that effective learning in organisations comes from three areas: experiential learning (real-world tasks) making up the bulk; social learning (interactions with others) following in second place; and structured, formal education in last place and making up just a small percentage of how we learn. This is why LMS products, traditionally focussed…
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Breaking free: how a £100 RPA tool saved £150K in vendor fees

The final project at my last role involved extracting seven years of learner data for 80,000 learners from an LMS that was being decommissioned. The shock of our vendor’s £150,000 quote to both extract and host 3TB of learner data led me to explore a robotic process automation (RPA) solution using a low cost browser…
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Look out, here comes Microsoft!

Towards the end of 2020 our Head of Learning Design asked me to do a short presentation to her design team about where I thought the main disruptions to the Learning & Development technology market would come from in the year ahead. Usually we would look at startups, niche suppliers or parallel industries to identify…
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UK and Ireland MoodleMoot 2016

MoodleMoot UK and Ireland 2016 showed yet again that the Moodle ecosystem is in good health, with lots of new community members attending for the first time, plenty of old timers coming back, major institutions reaffirming their faith and Moodle HQ showing how the product itself is adapting to the future with new features and…
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Building a learning analytics platform

As learning analytics continues to rise up the agenda in the corporate learning & development (L&D) sector, one thing is becoming glaringly apparent: we should not expect a one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf approach to learning analytics.  This is a specialist discipline that cannot be bottled up into a single product. Sure, there are products such as Knewton, a Product as…
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MoodleMoot 2015 Review

This year was my fourth Moot and it was another cracking event. Dublin is a welcoming and accessible location so it was good to be back here. I attended the two conference days on May 12-13, but the conference was topped and tailed by a workshops day on the 11th and a developer hackfest on…
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Moodling around in Edinburgh

It was great to be at the UK MoodleMoot in Edinburgh this week. It has become an annual highlight for me as a place to meet old and new friends alike, to share some of the things we’ve been working on and to learn from the vast experiences of the Moodle community around the UK…
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Top ten learning platform trends from 2013

The end of the calendar year is a great opportunity to reflect and take stock of some of the key trends in the learning platforms market that have stood out for me and the team at Epic over the past 12 months. Do these reflect your own views of the market? What was big for…
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MoodleBrighton December 2013 – Exploring Moodle 2.6

After a lapse of several months we finally had a MoodleBrighton meetup last week. It was good to see everyone again and to catch up on what’s been going on, and we had a couple of new faces too. It was a good session, loosely based around an exploration of Moodle 2.6 with attendees coming from…
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The art of writing LMS requirements

I saw a really well constructed Request for Proposal this week. It was about 10 pages long and listed a set of business requirements and a set of technical requirements for an LMS, without being overly prescriptive about the specifics of how the system should operate. I work on responses to a lot of these…
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