Top 10 Free Learning Management Systems for HR / Business - November 2020

The philosophy behind Myicourse is to encourage just about anyone to promote and share their valuable knowledge, which is why it’s free. This LMS platform lets you create a virtual & branded learning institution where you can publish or even sell courses. Content can be set as public and shared with anyone or made private and only viewable by whomever you select. While it’s not entirely aimed at small businesses, it’s proven to be popular with entrepreneurs. Myicourse is fully customizable and therefore a good enough tool for employee training and onboarding. Some highlights among their features are:

• Advanced Analytics: For corporate training, Myicourse aims towards giving HR managers a bird’s eye view of the student experience. It monitors and reports for student traffic, time spent on courses, test results, and much more. ‍
• Branding & Naming: The Myicourse site you create is fully brandable with your company’s name, choice of colors, images, and corporate logo. The resulting URL will be something like “selectsoftwarereviews.myicourse.com”.

With a beautiful and intuitive design, it’s surprising that GoSkills is free forever and for as many learners as you like. They offer the option to upgrade and unlock more features or gain access to their library of over 70 award-winning on-demand courses. Their free LMS, however, is simple, easy to use, and includes most of what a small or medium-sized business would need to train employees:

• Content Management: Upload your courses from any content on the web. Choose to conduct employee training with classroom courses, embedded videos, external links, as well as custom courses through SCORM, xAPI, AICC, or CMI5. ‍
• Reporting & Analytics: Assign courses to different teams with ease, create learner groups, and generate specific reports for each of them. The key metrics include course completion, time to complete, tests taken, and certificates earned.

Blackboard is one of the most popular LMS tools out there. Their version for business is not free, although they do offer a free demo. For that reason, their free-forever version, CourseSites, has become popular with small businesses. It is hosted online and the user experience is quite similar to the old WordPress dashboard. Whether you’re familiar with that or not, it’s quite easy to sign up for and start uploading training materials. Some of its features are: 

• Course Discussions: Each course has a built-in feature to facilitate debate around it and encourage students to share what they learn and any pertinent resources. ‍
• Blackboard Collaborate: You can program live webinar-like training sessions that are hosted right on the app. These can also integrate with the workflow of an existing course and be programmed into the built-in calendar.

From the eLearning family of TalentLMS and eFront, comes TalentCards. This training platform is mainly designed for mobile workers and it’s free for up to 5 users. It’s for businesses that need to deliver training to staff members regardless of where their work might take them. For this reason, the learning content in TalentCards is oriented toward highly-engaging and bite-sized lessons. The idea is to provide frontline workers, such as on-site support staff, with training that they can access through the mobile devices they already carry with them. Some use cases for TalentCards include:

• Mobile Learning Card Editor: Training materials are refined into the most essential information presented in the form of cards that users can access on any smartphone or tablet. TalentCards’ mission is to let you leverage the power of microlearning. ‍
• Micro-assessments: These cards can also include images, audio, and videos, and short assessments at the end to boost memory retention. Naturally, the assessments assign a score to the user and this translates into gamification-like features.

What’s interesting about Coggno is that they’re also not just a software vendor, but a whole ecosystem of online courses created by experts in different fields. A good bulk of their offering is directed towards businesses, and their LMS is just a part of the service. If you’re looking for something very basic and access to ready-made courses from third-parties, their Training University program is free for unlimited users. Some of the features are: 

• Live Training: Apart from letting each team member go through courses in their own time, you can also create live training sessions in the form of webinars.‍
• Certifications: A good percentage of Coggno’s collection of courses lets your office get certified in everything from HR Skills to Jobsite Safety.

With pricing that’s been reported to get as low as $0.60 per year, per user, UpsideLMS is worth a mention here even if they don’t have a fully-free version. They do offer a free trial though, and are a highly valued and award-winning SaaS LMS. They’re also the makers of Plethora, an eLearning library with over 80,000 courses and videos for organizational training. Here are some of the features that set their LMS apart:

• AI-Powered Engagement: The LMS makes tailored recommendations to users based on their previous behavior, interests, and learning style. ‍
• Multiple Portal Management: You can host several portals with different branding, separate login access, and a distinct URL. These personalized learning environments can be adapted to different departments or multiple organizations.

If you’d like to go the open source route, Chamilo is one of the best-rated learning management and collaboration systems out there. Like with any open source tool, It would require you to do the installation yourself and configure your own servers, which is certainly a cost that needs contemplating. Other than that, the software is free to use and there is a very active community of users that supports the project and offers guidance in the face of any issues. As to the software itself, it’s a powerful and customizable LMS with features like:

• Course Creation: You can organize your learning content in separate courses and decide how complex to make them, whether it’s a simple text course with multiple choice quizzes or advanced courses with features like their own forum, group collaboration, and assignments. ‍
• Learning Types: Choose from teaching styles like asynchronous instructor-led, asynchronous self-paced or blended learning. You can also host live lessons in virtual classrooms through video conferencing. Mobile learning is also supported as long as there is an internet connection.

This highly-popular LMS is designed for organizations that want online learning for their employees, partners, and even customers. They strive to get rid of the complexity that comes with creating and distributing learning programs and help you launch courses in record time. Their claim is that people are able to share courses two times as fast as with similar software because of how easy they make it for you to reuse content from other sources. Their notable features include: 

• Gamification: Courses are made more fun with the option to give out points and badges, set up different levels, and even sync with leaderboards in real-time. ‍
• Fast Content Creation: TalentLMS lets you build courses with the training materials you already have or using content from other web sources such as Google Drive, Youtube, Prezi, WordPress, SCORM, and more.