Auzmor Learn vs. Sakai

Overall Auzmor Learn works well handling the basic Learning Management Systems needs for OSHA general industry (1910) where employees are in an office, business or industry setting and stay or return to their workplace frequently. Most us a desktop computer to do their training. In the construction industry 90% of employees are in the field nearly 100% of the time. As a specialty contractor that falls under the OSHA standard (1926) Auzmor has listened to my concerns and challenges and has begun to address them by customizing features.

Incentivized

Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students.

• Assessments can now easily be uploaded in bulk using a CSV template.
• Successful assessment submission(s) from a learner will trigger a notification to their respective manager/instructor/admin who assigned the training to them.
• We can create a lesson through video formats, documents, embedding links, YouTube & Vimeo.
• It can create and track our live training both classroom and online.
• The course is publicly accessible with public weblink.

Incentivized

• User friendly, easy to navigate
• Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better.
• Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS.

Incentivized

• There was some missing functionality that was raised to the Auzmor team, which they are very receptive of that feedback and work with you on providing a solution, work around or addressing it in a future release.
• Being able to attach certain file types for training exercises was not supported.
• There was some limitations on resizing some images and text boxes during course content creation.
• Some of the whitelabeling and cutomization of the UI has some limitations.

Incentivized

• While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements.
• Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them.
• I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit.

Incentivized

From a functionality standpoint the software continues to meet the requirements we had set for the LMS we chose to implement. The addition of new features has increased the likelihood we will continue to use Auzmor Learn. As long as the usability of the software meets the needs of our learners we would not have a reason to look at other options

Incentivized

Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors.

Incentivized

The platform is simple to use. I can have a new employee come to orientation with no computer skills and get that person up and running on Auzmor within minutes. On the admin side, Auzmor is intuitive and easy to use.

Incentivized

When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup.

Incentivized

Excellent customer support. They work with you to set up the courses, tell you industry best practices, and a good way for structuring courses. Whatever additional features are needed, can be discussed at length with the Auzmor Learn team and they are very open to solve and add these to their product backlog for future updates.

Incentivized

Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.

Incentivized

No, I don't

Incentivized

There are a lot of LMS options out there and it was quite daunting trying to see how everyone compared and differentiated themselves. While they all may have been able to provide the LMS functionality we would eventually need, Auzmor stood out in the conversations we had based on functionality, pricing and support. It was not just an LMS product, but a partnership we were getting to make sure we would have everything we would initially need and also for where we wanted our training to be for years to come.

Incentivized

Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back.

Incentivized

• Auzmor Learnr has helped us continue our compliance training with ease.
• Through Auzmor Learn's available trainings, we have been able to create learning paths to help us further develop our Management Teams.
• Being able to manage the trainings with such ease has saved so much time.

Incentivized

• Our Sakai costs are about 10% (ten percent) what it would cost for the big name LMS. For a school with a budget. this is a deciding factor.
• We can more easily afford more online programs to attract more students.
• Hard-won resources can go to needy places in the institution rather than to the online infrastructure.

Incentivized