TalentLMS

The design of this software is well thought out. Although TalentLMS has many sophisticated features (everything one could possibly need and more), it's designed in such a way to minimize user complexity. As an admin and instructor, I'm able to get things done quickly without much time and effort (with limited technical knowledge). The visual look and feel of an LMS is important to me. Many LMS systems look "techy" and are NOT a pleasure to use. TalentLMS is clean and elegant and provides a great experience for admins, instructors and users. I think of TalentLMS as the Apple computer of LMS systems. Another big differentiator is that TalentLMS enables instructors to create courses quickly without a painful learning curve that kills productivity. Learning content is placed into buckets called learning objects. Any kind of content hosted anywhere can be used. Making changes to courses is a snap. Also, I found the white labeling and customization of TalentLMS to be surprisingly easy. Support documentation is thorough and well written. I was able to quickly customize our learning portal without doing any HTML coding whatsoever in about 30 minutes! No help from technical experts needed. Before deciding on TalentLMS, I reviewed dozens of LMS providers (a hair-pulling experience) and found most to be very expensive, complex, lack-luster on feature and visual appeal. I just don't have the patience or the time to deal with those handicaps! We are very glad to have discovered TalentLMS.

After about a year, I haven't encountered any problems using TalentLMS. Of course, there's always room for improvement on the way to perfection. There appears to be a little overlap in the learning objects - Content, Web content and videos are really just "content". However, this could be by design. Maybe there should be a universal content object that accommodates all content types. The only videos accepted for the "Video" object are YouTube. However, we use another video hosting platform to protect our content from download, among other reasons. However, this is not a real problem because we just embed our videos using the content learning object, which looks sort of like a WordPress content box. Just copy the embed code from the video provider and paste into the content box. That's it; works great. The only other thing I can think of is that the default HTML video player could use a few more control bar options such as view quality selection and a way to set download video or disallow download video. However, this is not a problem for us because we use embed video codes from our video hosting provider and therefore the provider's video player is used instead of the default HTML player. We control the features of this video player on the video hosting side.

The product is pretty user-friendly, and if you are struggling with how to do something while creating/editing your course, you can easily find answers to most issues in the knowledge base.
I also liked the various types of content that can be added to a course. For example, I've utilized text, PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, images, videos, tests, surveys, web links, and more all in one single course - and I probably haven't even explored half of the available features!

Working with a user's course expiration date can sometimes be tricky and could definitely use some improvement. For example, to change the expiration date for a user, logically I would go to the "Users" page, go to the user's courses, and extend the date there. Instead, you have to go to the course page, go to course content, go to course users, and extend it from there. Also, I've found that sometimes you can't extend a user's deadline without resetting their progress for the entire course. I haven't quite figured out why that happens.
I also think the navigation on the user's end could use a little clarity. An automated "course tour" would be beneficial.