What distinguishes Forma LMS from Moodle and what should bring you to choose the first over the latter?
Nowadays, it is not easy to choose the right platform. There are dozens of Open Source products, and dozens of SaaS products to choose from.
If you Google it, you’ll likely find results that suggest Moodle or Forma Lms, so you will need some criteria to choose from.
What distinguishes Forma LMS from Moodle and what should bring you to choose the first over the latter?
When choosing an LMS, stakeholders often go to the apparent default choice, Moodle. We recently had the chance to see a detailed report and thorough comparison between the more famous Moodle and Forma Lms. We decided to write a quick summary with a comparison and with some reasons you might want to prefer us against the more famous "competitor".
Rather than running a pedestrian comparison over the hundreds of features these 2 LMS' have (yes/no) we thought it would be more useful to have a recap on the main differences and points of strengths of Forma Lms.
Especially to those who have no technical knowledge, platforms may all seem alike. And indeed, Forma and Moodle have 80% of the features in common. Yet, Forma has some specific features that make it unique and that we definitely want to improve in the next releases.
Ease of Use
Generally speaking, creating "course boxes" is easier with Forma, whereas Moodle has many options that can look unclear to the untrained eye.
The same applies to uploading Learning Objects: with Forma, content uploading is pretty straightforward while with Moodle - again - there are a lot of possible options. Most of them are suited to school or academic training, while the simpler options in Forma make life easier for corporate-oriented training.
Learning Objects Organisation and Management
Concerning the organization of learning objects in a tree structure, Forma does not have this feature natively but has carried out an integration with H5P, available to forma.association members, that makes this possible. The H5P integration also allows Forma to integrate off-the-shelf content and track its consumption, which is not possible on Moodle.
Reports
Moodle’s reporting is detailed but, unlike Forma, it's complicated to get to see the information you’re interested in. Forma’s reports are easier to access and examine.
User Management
On both platforms, trainers can easily handle training materials (delete, copy, move…), have access to multimedia resources and make resources and activities available to learners outside the training spaces.
In both Forma and Moodle, users have a home page (HTML content) where the organization displays the training accessible to them, as well as the courses’ catalog, structured in categories/subcategories. It is also possible to view a particular category or a document linked to courses. Courses appear as Netflix-like blocks.
Similarly to Moodle, in Forma too learners have a page (My courses) displaying the courses they are enrolled in. It is also possible to create training programs (sets of courses), courses modules, and to register users.
Unlike Moodle, however, in Forma users have a real Dashboard in which they can find the calendar of their courses (start dates), the courses in which they are registered, the certificates obtained, and the messages received from other users (from there they can also send ). The administrator can arrange the different Dashboard elements and assign a particular layout to a learner or group of learners.
Multiple catalogues
In Forma it’s easier to create multiple catalogues and/or assign catalogues to specific categories, such as:
- Users belonging to one or more specific groups
- Users belonging to one or more nodes of the organization chart
- Users who play a role that we want to be able to view the Catalogue.
What does it all mean? It means that thanks to the hierarchic structure it’s easier to assign specific content to specific users or groups of users.
Multiclient: Multitemplate and Dynamic URL
Unlike Moodle, Forma welcomes a multi client environment and offers the opportunity to create different templates to manage it. After you have created multiple templates, you can link them to different URLs or different org chart nodes. You can also have your users displayed different login pages.
Recap
We’ve spent years experiencing how we and our customers use Forma Lms, and listening to the ones that switch from Moodle to Forma. We’ve also interviewed many of them and these are their more relevant answers:
“I prefer Forma for its multi-site environment.” (Claudio)
“Forma is simpler and clearer.” (Luca)
“I prefer Forma for its very good graphics and basic features.” (Maurizio)
“I like Forma because it’s easy to use and for its features.” (Renato)
“Forma is easier to use.” (Angelo)
“Forma is less chaotic and more pleasant.” (Chiara)
“Forma is simpler.” (Alessandro)
“Forma has an easier set up.” (Graeme)
