Open LMS vs. Blackboard Learn: Which LMS Leads in Ecommerce and Automation Capabilities?

Choosing the best learning management system for your needs isn’t just about picking software that can house and deliver courses. A robust learning platform with ecommerce capabilities can help you reach a new audience of learners and generate more revenue to support your long-term objectives. In addition to expanding your business prospects, the right LMS should streamline your processes via savvy automations and save instructors valuable time that can be better spent on building relationships that promote learners’ success.

To help you make an informed decision about which LMS is right for your organization, this article compares two popular learning platform solutions: Open LMS and Blackboard Learn by Anthology.

Meet the Contenders!

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Open LMS

Open LMS delivers fully customizable, highly effective digital learning experiences for every user by leveraging and enhancing open-source Moodle™. Open LMS is a central hub for your eLearning content with features and extensions like learning analytics, personalized learning options, extensive customization capabilities, and offline mobile access to ensure every user has access to an accessible and flexible learning experience.

Through its hosting partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Open LMS has nearly limitless resources to protect your information, including a multiple-level backup strategy to safeguard your data against unexpected outages. Open LMS also has a team of global software experts who respond to administrative support requests in an average of just 50 minutes. High-level administrative support is included with every Open LMS software instance to ensure your needs are met swiftly and effectively.

There are two versions of the Open LMS platform:

• Open LMS EDU: Designed for academic learning and tailored for institutions such as colleges, universities, and vocational education and training (VET) institutes.
• Open LMS WORK: Focused on employee training and aimed toward businesses and organizations with existing learning and development (L&D) programs or those looking to implement one.

Blackboard Learn

Blackboard Learn by Anthology is a cloud-based LMS that primarily targets large institutions in the higher education industry, and also offers solutions for K-12, corporate, and government clients. The platform is the same whether your learners are enrolled in a university course or a professional training program. Blackboard Learn includes common features like mobile accessibility, third-party integrations, and course management.

Open LMS: Key Product Features

1) Advanced Multi-Tenancy Capabilities

With Open LMS’s advanced multi-tenancy capabilities, you can create independently managed tenants under a single LMS and give them unique branding, user management, and authentication systems. Large corporates or university systems can easily divide their training and learning resources among their various brands or entities in a controlled, organized environment. L&D teams can save time and resources by sharing learning and training content with tenants of their choosing, and without duplicating or recreating materials.

2) Personalized Learning Designer (PLD)

The PLD is an Open LMS-exclusive plugin that lets instructors differentiate learning experiences for users by automating elements of their courses. The actions users take within a course can trigger various automations from the PLD, including:

• Sending assessment feedback to learners based on whether or not they’ve met certain thresholds
• Setting assignment completion reminders when learners are inactive for a set period of time
• Giving content recommendations based on a learner’s previous training and/or academic history
  

Using the PLD helps instructors spend less time on repetitive, manual processes and more time attending to their learners’ needs.

3) Extensive Customization Options

With Open LMS, you can choose how your LMS looks and feels to your end-users, down to the very last detail. The extensive customization options ensure that your platform becomes an extension of your organizational culture and brand. Open LMS makes it easy to integrate your existing logos, color schemes, fonts, and other branding elements into the platform so your users have a consistent and cohesive experience that reflects your goals and values.

Open LMS offers even more configuration potential with back-end customizations and unique plugins designed by a team of software engineers to solve your organization’s specific pain points and further distinguish your platform from other institutions. The customizations can also be used to import data from your HR, CRM, ERP, and other systems to further distinguish your platform and create a centralized user management and reporting system within the LMS.

4) Powerful AI-Driven Content Creation

Open LMS streamlines the content creation process and refines your existing learning materials with its AI-Assisted Editor for TinyMCE. Your administrators and instructors can use prompts to receive high-quality text, HTML elements, and CSS styles generated by the AI assistant. The tool can also quickly summarize information, translate text into over a dozen different languages, generate bulleted lists, and perform a range of other time-saving tasks by leveraging its predefined quick actions.

Additionally, Open LMS integrates with AI community-developed plugins like text-to-question and text-to-image tools so you can enrich your courses and learning materials with effortlessly created images or questions.

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5) Exclusive Ecommerce Suite

Open LMS helps organizations and learning institutions increase revenue with its ecommerce suite. LMS administrators can create catalogs for selling courses and certifications, and training content can be sold as a single instance or as a subscription. Catalogs can include a variety of options like:

• Quiz attempts
• Learning subscriptions
• Free courses with optional premium content
• Live event seats
• Skills certifications that can be pushed out to LinkedIn

You can use Open LMS eCommerce to advertise your content offerings with direct course purchase links that can be embedded into your social media copy or other promotional material. These links take interested customers directly to a purchase page and reduce the number of clicks in their journey, giving users a cleaner experience and increasing their odds of buying your product.

6) Full Mobile Access (Even Offline)

Your learners and instructors can use Open LMS’s mobile app on a phone, tablet, or other mobile-ready device to access their learning content offline and on the go. Available on Android and iOS, the app can be fully customized to match your organization’s brand. Learners and course instructors can use the app to access:

• Course content, activities, calendars, and grade books
• Interactive content, including videos and synchronous virtual meetings
• Internal messaging between learners and trainers
• File management
• Mobile push notifications

7) Extensive Administrative Support

As part of its standard LMS agreement (and at no additional cost), Open LMS’s global team of software developers and LMS experts responds to your administrative requests and offers high-level support to ensure your platform keeps running smoothly.

Open LMS clients also receive discounted access to premium content in addition to free resources from the Open LMS Academy, a collection of professional development courses. Content in the Open LMS Academy helps you improve your knowledge and skills in areas like:

• Creating courses
• Using LMS features and functionalities
• Applying digital learning pedagogy and andragogy

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8) Automatic Recertification Reminders and Course Enrollments

Open LMS ensures end-users remember to complete essential training tasks with automated reminders and course enrollments. Administrators can configure the platform to trigger reminders for users when their credentials are due to expire, ensuring learners (and their organizations) stay compliant. Automatic course enrollments take the guesswork out of skills development and help learners stay on track with their training.

9) Actionable Analytics and Granular Reporting

Open LMS takes you beyond standard reporting metrics to offer a comprehensive look at your learning programs. Receive real-time visualizations with the Open Report Engine (ORE). This analytics tool pulls data from multiple sources—including course enrollments and completions, cohort progress, badges, and learner feedback—to give you a customized picture of your organization’s learner activity. You can also integrate key analytics from ORE directly into your LMS dashboards. The data you share is up to you. Administrators can set user roles and permissions to ensure that learners’ privacy is protected and instructors only see the data that’s relevant to their courses.

Through its partnership with IntelliBoard, Open LMS gives you an in-depth look into your learners’ engagement and retention data, as well as predictive insights to help you make strategic decisions for the future.

10) Access to an Extensive Partner Network to Further Customize Your LMS

Open LMS collaborates with an extensive network of top-tier partners that help you take your platform from a place to store content to a software powerhouse for your organization. For example, get off-the-shelf or custom content to supplement your learning programs with GP Strategies. Leverage AI to detect plagiarism and steer learners away from academic dishonesty with Copyleaks. Ensure your courses are inclusive and your instructors are well-informed with an accessibility toolkit from Brickfield Education Labs.

Open LMS partners also offer automated exam proctoring, virtual whiteboards, and interactive video tools to engage learners, and much more.

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Blackboard Learn: Key Product Features

1) AI Capabilities to Support Instructors

Blackboard Learn’s AI Design Assistant uses generative AI technology to help instructors build their courses, rubrics, and assessments. Instructors can review and edit materials generated by the AI tool before publishing them to a course. The tool is meant to save instructors time while still building helpful courses and content.

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2) Automated Learner Reports

Similar to Open LMS’s PLD, Blackboard Learn offers some automated processes that help instructors remind their students to interact with courses and complete required tasks. Administrators can establish conditions that will trigger reports to identify at-risk learners. Blackboard Learn instructors can use information in those reports to reach out to learners who need additional support, whereas the PLD feature from Open LMS will send reminders automatically on the instructor’s behalf.

3) Mobile App for Instructors

Like Open LMS, Blackboard Learn has a mobile app. Some features are only available in the web version of the LMS, but the app gives instructors access to common functionalities like grading assessments, updating course forums, and communicating with learners on the go.

4) Administrative Support

Blackboard Learn offers standard administrative support through its service, Behind the Blackboard. This service is included for all customers. Blackboard Learn also offers multiple SaaS service packages that include various benefits at different price points. This differs from Open LMS's approach of including its extensive administrative support services for all clients at no additional cost.

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Blackboard Learn’s Weaknesses

1) No Access to Ecommerce Features

Blackboard Learn doesn’t have ecommerce functionality, which means its clients are missing out on a potential revenue stream. Higher learning institutions, especially those supported by public funds, have limited budgets. Reselling popular courses and other learning resources could help these institutions generate more funds to support their goals, but Blackboard Learn doesn’t offer a solution to meet this need.

2) Fewer Customization Options

While Open LMS supports standards-based external tools integrations, it can also be customized on the back-end. Blackboard doesn’t have the same flexibility. Instead, it only leverages Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to give its clients some customization solutions to meet their needs. Since Blackboard Learn’s code can’t be customized, it cannot be uniquely tailored to each client with the same level of specificity as Open LMS.

3) Limited Content Design Support

Although Blackboard Learn has generative AI capabilities, it still lacks dedicated course and content development support. Blackboard Learn doesn’t offer off-the-shelf training courses or custom content design services, meaning its clients have to hone their own course building skills or reach out to third-party providers to support that need.

4) Minimal Automated Features

While Blackboard Learn is capable of providing some automated reports to identify at-risk learners, the software doesn’t go the extra mile to send reminders or other communications to learners without manual intervention from an instructor or administrator.

Open LMS’s Weaknesses

1) Clients Can Customize a Lot But Share Control With an Expert Team

Open LMS clients can tailor the platform in nearly endless ways thanks to their partnership with an expert team of software developers and learning designers. That partnership also means sharing control of your learning site with a team of experts that ensure your investment is protected if an unexpected error occurs. Sharing control of the software means engineers and LMS experts manage all of your system updates. They’ll keep your plugins running smoothly and keep your sensitive data secure.

2) Some Features Only Available Through Partnerships

Open LMS’s standard software agreement already includes an extensive array of features, but some functionalities and add-ons like automated exam proctoring, accessibility audits, and advanced course content creation services can only be accessed through partner integrations.

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When Is Open LMS Not a Good Fit?

Open LMS might not be the best fit for you if:

• You don’t anticipate a need for ecommerce features
• You don't expect to benefit from automated course enrollments, deadline reminders, and personalized feedback messages
• You don't have a need for back-end customization

When Is Blackboard Learn Not a Good Fit?

Blackboard Learn may not be the ideal learning software solution if:

• You need an LMS capable of automating learner communications
• You require a learning environment that can be fully customized on the back-end to reflect your unique values and culture
• Your learners and instructors need offline mobile learning environments with the same functionalities available on the desktop site
• You’re seeking an ecommerce platform to provide additional revenue streams
• You have multiple brands or entities with unique learning environments, and you want to manage them under a unified learning platform

One Key Takeaway: Choose Open LMS!

Open LMS offers extensive features and functionalities, a fully customizable learning environment, unbeatable administrative support, and a team of experts to help you every step of the way—all included in your subscription agreement. When you choose Open LMS:

• Advanced ecommerce capabilities let you increase your potential revenue
• Your learners benefit from differentiated experiences that support their unique needs
• Your instructors save valuable time with automated reports, reminders, and learner communications
• Your learning platform is customized to your specifications to represent what matters most to your organization, from back-end software configuration to visual elements like colors and logos
• Multi-tenancy capabilities let you easily manage learning for your large institution, organization, or extended enterprise
• Learning doesn’t have to stop if the WiFi goes out because your users have access to course content both online and offline
• Your software is backed by a team of dedicated experts who want to see your program succeed
• And more!