Acorn PLMS vs. LearnUpon

With regard to course construction and design, I think LearnUpon excels in many areas. There tends to be a bit of a learning curve for new users, but the dashboard interface and finding courses that a student has enrolled in is pretty quickly resolved, and it is very convenient to house materials in LearnUpon and ensure that students are able to access them, rather than having to rely on printing materials and/or manually distributing documents through emails or some other digital means (DropBox, Drive, Hightail, etc.). It is, for all intents and purposes a Learning Management System, and is intended to manage and track students' coursework and learning. I will say though, that in terms of record-keeping, is an area where it falters. Finding and maintaining receipts of orders placed through the storefront is not convenient from an administrative standpoint. Processing a refund for a student if we cancel a class, that was an enrollment transferred from a previous class, is clunky. Guaranteeing that members are able to purchase course enrollments under their specific price tier, while at the same time preventing non-members from doing so, is not convenient and not something that is easily fixable. Currently, new users can only [default] to either members OR non-members, and that classification has to be manually adjusted. Given that some organizations can run into above 10,000 members, this is an obvious challenge.

Incentivized

• LearnUpon has EXCELLENT support. I have always been quickly and effectively taken care of whenever I had a problem (the majority of the "problems" were simply my perception; turned out not to be problems at all).
• LearnUpon has a simple, intuitive interface that works and rarely causes problems. Obviously, they heavily user-tested the interface before implementing. Too many LMSes do not do this and the interfaces which have been designed by software nerds are super hard to navigate.
• LearnUpon has lots of features packed into one system. You can host multiple "portals" for different audiences, you can have learning paths, you can upload videos and documents of all kinds. It just works and is not limiting.
• LearnUpon has an EXCELLENT test creation/implementation feature which I have not seen in any other LMS I have used.

Incentivized

• No integration with a payment gateway that shows in a students account what courses they have purchased at what price.
• There is some confusion on when registering for the LMS that only a username and password need to be supplied, it does not require a first and last name.
• Limited function of coupon codes, too many restrictions make us come up with work around in order to utilize coupons.
• They ability to group students by the course type they are selecting not just custom data fields.

Incentivized

We've been a customer for six years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We're very happy with LearnUpon.

Incentivized

You cannot publicly post badges from LU which you can with Credly. That would be a nice feature. LU is a much nicer interface than both SumTotal and YourMembership/Crowdwisdom. However, course searchability was much easier in your membership. Course creation is much easier in LU. From an administration perspective, I think LU is easier to use, including standard reporting. Your membership has a much better self-assessment product than LearnUpon. You can rank your confidence when answering questions. You can also do more robust mapping

Incentivized

• LearnUpon helped us significantly reduce the cost of travel and lodging for staff and trainers who would previously have had to travel to participate in learning.
• LearnUpon helped introduce our organization to the concept of online learning and asynchronous study.
• LearnUpon helps us improve our staff's technological literacy by giving them a friendly and inviting system to learn from independently.

Incentivized