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4 Popular Free Learning Management Systems

About what a learning management system is, and how to choose LMS correctly, read here.

This article lists 4 popular platforms today. Moodle, Google Class and Edmodo are free. The main features of Schoology are available free of charge.

Moodle

Moodle is one of the most popular training management systems in the world, offering a huge number of opportunities for the creation and dissemination of teaching materials, student evaluation, and interaction between students and the teacher.

As it seems to me, Moodle is popular for two reasons. First, the platform is free, and secondly, it has a huge number of settings that allow you to easily adapt it to different needs.

For large organizations, the best way to work with Moodle will be to install the platform on your own server, and customize it to meet your current needs (choose the theme of the design, select the appropriate plug-ins, adjust the display options for the pages, and so on). For tutors and small educational organizations that do not have full-time IT specialists, and are not ready to pay for the services of invited specialists, a free hosting for Moodle-sites MoodleCloud appeared in 2015 would be a good solution.

Another great plus of Moodle is detailed documentation on the installation and maintenance of the platform, as well as the presence of a community of developers who are ready to come to the rescue and share their experience.

Edmodo

Edmodo is often called Facebook for schools. When working with this system, teachers and students create free accounts, and the teacher creates his class as a group. One teacher can have several groups, and each student can be in several groups.

To register as a student, you do not need to specify e-mail, enough class or group code that you can get from the teacher. When students enter Edmodo, they see a news feed, that is, all the ads and entries from the groups they are in.

Teachers can store educational materials available for downloading in the system, collect and evaluate assignments, and issue badges for success. Edmodo is a convenient platform for communication and interaction, especially for those who have experience using social networks, such as Facebook.

The interface of the platform is English-speaking, but it does not cause complications, as the system is very intuitive and easy to use.

The platform is completely free, and does not contain advertising.

Google Classroom

Google Class is a free educational platform from Google, which is becoming more and more popular.

Google Class allows you to create classrooms, publish and evaluate assignments, communicate with students, post ads, and store and distribute learning materials. Google Class does not have some features that can be found in other popular LMSs – for example, the possibilities for collaborative discussion are very limited – but in general the platform has many interesting features implemented through integration with other Google tools such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets Google Presentations, Google Calendar, and Gmail.

Schoology

Schoology has all the basic functions of LMS. The main distinguishing feature of the platform is great opportunities for interaction and teamwork: students among themselves, teachers among themselves, the teacher individually with the student, and so on.

User Schoology sees the news feed with the records of all the groups in which it is made, and can go to the pages of these groups. On the page of the course, teachers can publish assignments, collect and evaluate the work, mark the deadlines for submitting tasks in the calendar, conduct discussions, conduct testing, and store the course materials available for download.

There is a function of creating groups in which teachers can unite with both students and with other teachers, including from other schools. Students can create their own groups, while the school fully controls their functioning.

Schoology is integrated with various applications, such as Vimeo, eduCanon, Google Drive and Evernote. The interface language is English. The main features of the platform are available for free.