Our leadership has been throwing around the idea of an online school for a few years now. I was asked to see what other churches were doing and if any had any good examples or Learning Management Software they are using.
This online classroom is mainly intended to equip all who attend our church, but also those who want to go deeper and maybe dovetail with our intern process.
Do you currently use a ChMS? There are a lot of functions that are identical to an LMS.
Will you only be delivering content or tracking and assessing student progress? I would suggest connecting with a local school system and asking their IT guys about how involved an LMS truly is. As a former educator, there is no magic behind an LMS. You will need a lot of people (teachers, managers, etc) to keep the data accurate.
Depending on how advanced you will go with the online school, either of these may fit need:
Each has a catalogue or pre-built courses for churches. These are editable to fit your church’s needs. You can also create your own classes and courses.
We are in the process of designing our roll out of Ministry Grid later this year.
It really depends on how much you need to customize things. If your courses will be pretty straightforward and you just need people to sign up and go through them, then there are a number of great options. If you need to keep track of grades, applications, and so on, then you’ll need to dig deeper.
We’re rolling out an online version of our believers training program that’s been going on video for almost 30 years. Because it’s something that you are required to pay for and we provide a certificate at the end of each completed course, it demands an application process. We have built out our course on LifterLMS (running on WordPress) with Gravity Forms and Stripe integrated for applications and payments.
If you’re comfortable working with WordPress, I recommend LifterLMS. If you want something you don’t need to get all techy with, take a look at Teachable.
If you are looking for a good LMS then try Moodle. It is extensively used in Higher Education institutions and schools across the globe for tracking students, lecturers, content control, etc.
We use Canvas by Instructure. They have many different integrations with various SIS and do a good job using saml and other third party systems for login.
Our company ChurchLEARN is a dedicated LMS for the church. We’ve got a really user friendly and flexible platform with some great features specific to the churches needs. churchlearn.com. Happy to chat anytime!
We’ve talk about it a lot. Bottom line. We don’t have a media production capability with responsibility and resources to fulfill this mission and without that you aren’t going to get there.