18 July 2023
Top 5 Questions to Ask a Potential LMS Provider
Jonny McAlister
Head of Customer Experience
All the key questions to ask when you’re looking for a Moodle or Totara partner.
Buying an LMS is not something you do every day, so when you’re looking for an LMS provider to work with on a project it might be difficult to know where to start the conversation.
With that in mind, we’ve put together the top five questions to ask any potential Moodle or Totara partner you approach. The answers to these questions will help to steer you towards the right LMS provider for your project.
1. What can you achieve within my budget?
Sorry to advise you to make it about money from the first questions, but this will help to save you time and frustration. Marketing materials, case studies and testimonials will help you to narrow down your search but that will count for little if your budget doesn’t match the sort of project you’re hoping to emulate.
A frank conversation with prospective partners about what can be achieved within your budget is the best way to make a like-for-like comparison.
2. What are your storage tiers or prices?
Multimedia learning content, user data and other content can add up to take up a considerable amount of storage space. Check how much storage space a potential Moodle or Totara partner will be able to provide as standard, the price points for additional storage space and any penalties for exceeding your storage limit.
If you don’t have a clear idea of the amount of storage you’ll need, follow-up questions about how you can optimise storage might help you to find the right partner.
3. How many users can I have?
Find out whether a pricing tier or any other factor will limit the number of users you can have on your LMS. It’s important that any potential Totara or Moodle partner can accommodate all of your users within your budget.
It’s also worth considering whether the number of users is scalable: will you be able to add more users if your organisation expands and what will the financial implications be?
4. Will my LMS integrate with other systems?
The best e-learning infrastructure integrates seamlessly with the wider organisation. This helps to remove duplicated tasks, increase ease of access and promote user engagement.
Talk to potential Moodle or Totara partners about your existing systems and see how they would propose to integrate a learning platform most effectively within the infrastructure.
5. Can I do x?
If there’s a piece of functionality, branding or customisation that’s absolutely essential to the learning experiences you want to create, it’s worth mentioning this at the outset. Talk to potential Moodle or Totara partners about what you want to achieve and why. See how they respond.
This will help to rule out suppliers who can’t deliver what you need. Among other potential LMS providers, look out for signs of reticence or indications that your requirement will be shoehorned into the technology in a way that doesn’t really work. Equally, remain open to suggestions of how you might be able to achieve the same thing in a better or more efficient way.
Ask away
If you’d like to put those or any other questions to us, just fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
