Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
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DigitalChalk, by Sciolytix
Score 7.0 out of 10
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The DigitalChalk LMS, from Sciolytix gives users the tools and control to launch engaging, interactive, online courses. Users can create courses featuring animated PowerPoint, SCORM content, HD videos, audio, quizzes, exams and more.
$35
per month
LMS365
Score 8.1 out of 10
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ELEARNINGFORCE in Edgewater brings learning management to Office 365 and SharePoint. LMS365 blends with the Microsoft infrastructure and is designed to eliminate expensive integration, time-consuming development, and unwanted complexity. Learners access learning plans, courses, personal progress reports, and certificates from within the SharePoint business process.
Our organization previously used LMS365, which did not support eCommerce and had difficulties supporting external users. (My understanding is the issues with external users may have been directly related to our Microsoft implementation and not directly LMS365's fault, but it …
Manager of Credentialing and Organization Development
Chose LMS365
As a not for profit, we have to keep cost in mind in all decisions. After demos with various software we found LMS365 to be the most cost effective with the most ease of use.
Absorb LMS has been incredibly well suited to our business needs. It is a robust platform with a wide ranges of tools, which make it easy to implement whatever training is desired. While there are many tools and options, the system itself is not overwhelming. The team we have worked with at Absorb (Jordan Wolf and Steve Ernstes) made onboarding, implementation, and continued customer support a breeze. The amount of support we received when we did encounter small issues was amazing.
Digital Chalk is perfect for organizations who are looking for an easy to use Learning Management System and don't need all the bells, whistles, and bulk of the LMS giants, like Cornerstone or SuccessFactors. Digital Chalk doesn't require an administrative specialist to learn a whole new language and environment with endless options and settings. It's very easy to use for both learners and administrators, and yet at the same time provides the exact functions you need.
If a customer does not have SharePoint the entry in that kind of solution is a bit harder as the use of SharePoint can be so broad. It does not mean it is not the right solution as a company can use SharePoint LMS to start with and then expand to other functions and features. I strongly recommend to use SharePoint Standard or Enterprise and forgo the "free" SharePoint version as a) SharePoint's core functions and features are greatly enhanced in these two premium versions and b) more and more SharePoint LMS functions make use of these core Standard and Enterprise features in the future, like taxonomy, user profiles, etc. In general with all project it is as well recommended to have the full buy in by upper management and that the project initiative is fully supported. Adding such a solution (SharePoint LMS or any other LMS solution) will require the team not only to have a good plan on how the requirements can be achieved from a technical point of view, but how a training program can be rolled out to an organization of 5, 500, 5.000 or 50.000. The technical deployment of SharePoint LMS is measurable (I would say between 1-4 weeks based on the complexity, scale of the environment). 1-2 weeks of training (depending on the base knowledge of SharePoint in the company and the need to add knowledge of SharePoint LMS). That's it. Technically you are ready. If needed, any custom work, integration and development work comes on top. Where customer struggle is the availability and dedication of their own teams. Course content needs to be created, how should a course look like, what are the parameters, what are top ten things needed moving a course which was taught in a class room, but now to be delivered online. Buying the licenses is one thing, getting the solution up and running form a technical point of view is another, making it YOURS is the challenge!
Overall, Absorb LMS is pretty easy to use for learners and especially for admins. It's practical to create and manage course content - it provides the most crucial options and yet is lean enough not to overcomplicate the admin's life. The consistent and customizable "table-view" in most of the admin-areas is very helpful and easy to follow.
Using Enrollment Rules, Absorb LMS let you define who a course applies to and how they get enrolled. You can build rules based on learner attributes, such as department, location job role, group, to include or exclude specific audiences. The way Absorb LMS is using enrollment attributes, no other LMS actually can fulfill our requirements easier. Enrollment rules are mainly embedded in individual course options (you can also create scheduled enrollments outside of the courses).
While I used the platform, it improved its integrations with PowerPoint, making it easy to convert slides to the DigitalChalk format.
The editing layers for audio underneath the slides is very user-friendly and easy to use.
While we didn't use the quiz randomization, I liked how there was a structure built to it so that those who had more robust usage situations than ours would be able to improve engagement and assess learning at a higher level.
The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
more education around Absorb analyze essentials
How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
The administration of Digital Chalk is very easy. The function I think may be missing is an easy way to add revisions and assign them to the students who need them. For example, when you update a piece of a course it would have an indication that it is version xxx and would ask who would like to assign it to - everyone who has taken it before or just new students.
It would nice to have the system recognize when a student has already completed an element of a course that may be used in another course. For example, if video A is part of courses 1 and 2, and the student already watched it in course 1, it would ask the administrator if they should get automated credit for it in course 2, as well.
When the user clicks into a different portion of the file library and then needs to return to a previous class the software forces you to go all the way back to the beginning of the coursework, this isn’t that painful just annoying.
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
It is very simple for me: As I said, I am (we are) selling and consulting around SharePoint LMS. SharePoint LMS is a killer application which needs to be in every company which has a vision and mission to deliver and create knowledge. So you can say Thomas (me) is biased, but I only encourage you to check out the solution to hear what we have to say and stack our solution against the other solutions out there.
The system is very flexible, allowing admins to build dashboards that offer different UX and UI for different roles. The increase in usability is great for engagement and one-click actions. In addition to the dashboards, the admin interface is intuitive and allows managers to easily access reports for their teams.
Ultimately, in my opinion LMS365 is a bit clunky to use. It has most of the features you need, but most need to be configured by your technology department, e.g., SSO, user groups in Entra ID, notifications through Slack, teams, etc. If you're looking for an all-in-one solution, look elsewhere, as lms365 has several catches to its proposition.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should
My client success manager had to reach out once for our company once. Although it was not an Absorb issue (it was an issue on the course vendor side), Absorb offered a resolution while the vendor was fixing the issue. We were very happy with the resolution and feel like Absorb went above and beyond for us.
As I mentioned previously, Digital Chalk's customer support is excellent. I also got a reply back within an hour, and it was usually the same person. So, they were familiar with our needs and how we were using the system. Honestly, most of the time we had to contact their support, it was an issue on the user's side, not in the software. Yet, they still helped identify the issue and consulted on how to fix it.
The few times we actually needed support generally were during major upgrades of the system and getting a quick handle on how the configuration changed were the primary reasons.
The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.
DigitalChalk gave the organization the hands-on ownership of content creation and delivery while meeting our usage case of hands-off course management on a daily basis and extending the reach of the course content and certificate to as many people as possible. It's easy to use, very cost-effective to implement, and the overall experience means that the course participants get what they need out of the course without a lot of effort on their part.
I will pick EdApp or Totara if you're after an all-in-one LMS solution that is feature-rich. For a university educational setting, Moodle continues to make sense. Safety Culture now owns EdApp, so over time, these platforms will likely be merged. LMS needs a huge overhaul to catch up.
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization. Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot, with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to provide us with solutions.
We used Absorb LMS to track Annual Safety Training to ensure compliance with inspectors and ensure our teammates understand the risks and how to mitigate them safely. We were never able to track this before and thus, we simply didn't have mandatory annual training.
A huge drawback prior to implementation of Absorb LMS was our inability to offer more than our 40 purchased e-courses to our employees. These were mostly safety and equipment based courses, so we didn't have any soft skill development happening. Now we have hundreds of courses available from the Absorb library that cover the safety aspects, but we also have dozens of leadership courses, communication and influence courses, etc. It has been a huge gamechanger for our employees and their development opportunities! When I look at our course library, there are 400 courses, which over 300 being available through Absorb library (the other 80+ were made using Absorb Create).
DigtialChalk's ROI is positive - the cost model of low up-front costs to get started, then paying a small amount per course participant means that organizations implementing DigitalChalk as their platform get more than their money's worth from it. It returns profit quickly and on a consistent basis.
The asynchronous nature of the platform, combined with the targeted usage situation of hands-off course delivery and management, means that resources to create, deliver, and maintain courses can be held with either one person (like an instructional designer) or even an outside contractor. This means that there's little impact to the fixed operating costs involved with hiring someone else to manage it.
