Cornerstone OnDemand vs. LearnUpon

The dashboards and reporting needs more additional features to clean up the old reports, manage dashboards more effectively is my main concern. I recently launched one of three phases for dashboards and I noticed I cannot work efficiently seeing which dashboard is important to me, which has been shared with me. More organization is requested

Incentivized

With regard to course construction and design, I think LearnUpon excels in many areas. There tends to be a bit of a learning curve for new users, but the dashboard interface and finding courses that a student has enrolled in is pretty quickly resolved, and it is very convenient to house materials in LearnUpon and ensure that students are able to access them, rather than having to rely on printing materials and/or manually distributing documents through emails or some other digital means (DropBox, Drive, Hightail, etc.). It is, for all intents and purposes a Learning Management System, and is intended to manage and track students' coursework and learning. I will say though, that in terms of record-keeping, is an area where it falters. Finding and maintaining receipts of orders placed through the storefront is not convenient from an administrative standpoint. Processing a refund for a student if we cancel a class, that was an enrollment transferred from a previous class, is clunky. Guaranteeing that members are able to purchase course enrollments under their specific price tier, while at the same time preventing non-members from doing so, is not convenient and not something that is easily fixable. Currently, new users can only [default] to either members OR non-members, and that classification has to be manually adjusted. Given that some organizations can run into above 10,000 members, this is an obvious challenge.

Incentivized

• The user group community is unlike any other. It is easy to connect with other clients and the CSOD team is actively engaged, always interested in what clients want and need.
• Vast content catalog from a wide variety of providers. Content delivery service makes my job easier. I don't have to deal with course files and metadata!
• Ease of use for non-admin admins! I was not a LMS administrator prior to implementation so I learned as I went which was fully supported by the robust training available to system admins.

• LearnUpon has EXCELLENT support. I have always been quickly and effectively taken care of whenever I had a problem (the majority of the "problems" were simply my perception; turned out not to be problems at all).
• LearnUpon has a simple, intuitive interface that works and rarely causes problems. Obviously, they heavily user-tested the interface before implementing. Too many LMSes do not do this and the interfaces which have been designed by software nerds are super hard to navigate.
• LearnUpon has lots of features packed into one system. You can host multiple "portals" for different audiences, you can have learning paths, you can upload videos and documents of all kinds. It just works and is not limiting.
• LearnUpon has an EXCELLENT test creation/implementation feature which I have not seen in any other LMS I have used.

Incentivized

• User-submitted external training is editable by users even after it has been approved and completed on their transcript, UNLESS a transcript lock is put into place--which also renders all submitted certificates un-openable once approved. Thus they can never be referenced after approval.
• The system is designed for annual compliance training to be re-versioned annually. I [believe it] is a very un-user friendly for training that we don't want to re-version because users take it on a rolling, as-needed basis.
• Some very key components are not configurable and cause our users a great deal of confusion. For example, there is no way to turn off the search bar on a user transcript or even to edit the prompt text within it. Our users are constantly searching for training here, and end up re-opening/re-launching completed courses rather than registering for a new occurrence of a course.
• In general, we find Cornerstone [onDemand] clunky and that it does not really meet our needs.

Incentivized

• No integration with a payment gateway that shows in a students account what courses they have purchased at what price.
• There is some confusion on when registering for the LMS that only a username and password need to be supplied, it does not require a first and last name.
• Limited function of coupon codes, too many restrictions make us come up with work around in order to utilize coupons.
• They ability to group students by the course type they are selecting not just custom data fields.

Incentivized

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

We've been a customer for six years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We're very happy with LearnUpon.

Incentivized

For End-users it is exceptionally easy to use. There is admittedly a steep curve for admins, but simply because there is so much that is truly possible with the system. Cornerstone has been updating many features in recent years, though, which have been moving overall usability in a favorable direction.

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

Pages do not load quickly. Often times any action or selection of a box, drop down, check, pretty much ANY Javascript interaction causes the whole entire page to load/reload/start doing something in the background. This makes a nightmare for having to mass edit courses or upload ILT sessions. It's the one of the archaic web designs they use that really bugs me as an admin and makes working in the portal at times intolerable and insufferable

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

Overall our rep changed a handful of times during our LMS switchover, which made the training inconsistent. They offer a large amount of online training not specific for what we were looking for at the time, but we were able to make it work

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

We have been with Cornerstone OnDemand for about 7 years now. I do not recall the other products we evaluated at the time, but more recently there was some interest in using Workday as an LMS since that is our HR platform. Their learning platform, however, simply couldn't compete with what Cornerstone OnDemand can give us, especially with our critical need of robust reporting.

Incentivized

You cannot publicly post badges from LU which you can with Credly. That would be a nice feature. LU is a much nicer interface than both SumTotal and YourMembership/Crowdwisdom. However, course searchability was much easier in your membership. Course creation is much easier in LU. From an administration perspective, I think LU is easier to use, including standard reporting. Your membership has a much better self-assessment product than LearnUpon. You can rank your confidence when answering questions. You can also do more robust mapping

Incentivized

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

• Our goal is to standardize training across our company and its 5 permanent locations allowing us to build a common culture across the company.
• Our goal is to be able to push out specific training to our teams which are spread across an enormous geographical area of the United States.
• We are currently meeting our objectives - in less than three months' time our team members have completed more than 1500 individual courses through Cornerstone OnDemand.

Incentivized

• LearnUpon helped us significantly reduce the cost of travel and lodging for staff and trainers who would previously have had to travel to participate in learning.
• LearnUpon helped introduce our organization to the concept of online learning and asynchronous study.
• LearnUpon helps us improve our staff's technological literacy by giving them a friendly and inviting system to learn from independently.

Incentivized