First thing that makes a difference between online e-learning platforms is how those platforms interact with the customers. Some may have their own courses, while others aren’t sources of information themselves, but perform as learning management tools for independent course authors. Anyway! If you want to build a platform for online courses, these are the main types of e-learning platforms:
- Learning Management Systems
- Learning Management Ecosystems
- Custom Built Learning Platforms
Learning Management Systems are extremely simple platforms that provide you some basement for building your own learning courses. They are pretty widespread and they only give you some basic tools, while the core of the work is yours to do. There are both commercial and free-to-use LMSs – both types are quite popular and only slightly differ from each other in the terms of functionality.
Another type of online education platform is a Learning Management Ecosystem. They also deal with online learning management just like LMSs, yet there are several differences. LMEs apply different independently existing solutions making them work together as one. So basically, a Learning Management Ecosystem works as a conductor in the orchestra of separate online education tools.
Last but not least: Custom Built Learning Platforms – advanced sets of tools, containing all the facilities and data needed to make the educational process fun, interesting and complete. Those are the most expensive ones, usually, they are done from the very beginning till the end for one main beneficiary. Such platforms may exist in different forms and shapes, they are far more complicated than LMSs and LMEs and far more specific. Therefore, only some wealthy or profitable organizations can afford them, getting significant technical and organizational benefits in exchange for their resources.