Don McIntosh, Ph.D. has created a very comprehensive list of all the LMS/CMS vendors associated with a specific learners such as coorporate and educational based.  In this post I will see to use Dr. McIntosh’s list to categorize what I believe to be the top vendors in K12, Higher Education, or Business and make a selection for what is the optimal LMS for each organization.

The follow are snapshots from McIntosh’s paper entitled Learning Management Vendors, Feb. 2015

To determine the optimal LMS for an organization there are several factors to take into consideration such as:  the goals of the LMS for your organization; the needs of all the stakeholders;  determining whether or not to use open source or vendor; getting information from the vendor which includes pricing.

I have actually gone through this process for a smaller organization and I have had a fair amount experience using a variety of LMS/CMS such as ProProfs, Canvas, Angel, Blackboard, eCollege (Pearson Learning Studio) and Desire2Learn (Brightspace).

For a K12 or Higher Education school I would recommend the eCollege learning platform (which is now Pearson LearningStudio).  In my experience it flows very nicely from content to discussion to quiz or test which makes it very user friendly for students and teachers.

For a Business there are more flexible options depending on how robust of a system one desires.  ProProfs seems to be the most cost effective for that option.