I have reviewed many of the most common LMS company products, spoken with many sales people, and experimented with all of the big names in the industry. LMSs fall into two categories – they are either great at managing data and trash at providing a training builder or they have a great builder but have trash data management.

Two more things are important – if the company has a builder, how easy is it to maintain and what happens if you leave? MyQuest’s builder is excellent and easy to learn and build. More importantly, you can export all of your training if you ever leave – you get to keep all of the work.

No other builder or LMS allows that.

The most impressive thing, though, is that MyQuest’s CEO is responsive and flexible. In conversations, he grew to understand the unique needs that this industry has and worked out a special deal with Miravoy. This is the only LMS company that was willing to be flexible for our industry!

Full transparency: we are a reseller for MyQuest, but it is specifically and only because of MyQuest’s willingness to create a space for our industry. We would not support or advertise a company that is unwilling to be flexible with the law enforcement and firearms related training needs our industry has.

Miravoy does not have any hidden charges. We are keeping this as simple as possible because it is not our intention to make this a primary business. We are providing these services for companies or organizations that cannot afford proprietary LMSs.

However, there are Moodle plugins and add-ons that you may add to your instance that may cost extra – you will pay them directly, not Miravoy. Moodle has a large developer network who create plugins for functionality. Miravoy does not benefit nor warrant any plugins or add-ons used in Moodle. We just provide the Moodle vanilla box for you to build as you need.

We chose Moodle as our open source LMS for several, simple reasons:

• We have experience with PHP, MySQL, and Apache based systems.
• Moodle actively updates security and feature sets for their base product.
• Moodle has a very active and robust plugin development network.
• Moodle is easy(ish) to set up and update.
• Plenty of other technical and functional reasons.

There are other open source LMS systems, but we chose Moodle because they were the easiest to integrate and add to the hosting systems we have experience with. We investigated a number of them and some were very impressive, but they required additional training and experience with web technologies we don’t have experience with. So, we stick with what we know.

Most importantly, it is something we can setup and YOU can manage on your own, if you want to. We handle all of the technical stuff so you can get to doing what you do best – delivering training.

No, there is not a limit to the size of the file you can upload other than your disk size. However, if you have a large file to upload, you may be better off uploading it via File Manager or FTP rather than using the Moodle file upload system.

Moodle will show a limitation and, depending on how we are hosting your site, changes may need to be made to Moodle and server settings. We can adjust the size limit for you to upload as you need.

However, if your file sizes go over your allocated space, your yearly subscription may increase, we’ll let you know first though.

One thing to note: if you are new to creating training materials, there may be ways to reduce the file size and increase the speed of functionality of your training program. Please check our Recommendations section for more info.

Moodle allows a wide variety of file types to be uploaded, including SCORM packages. For more information on file types, please go to the Moodle website for their documentation.

You own everything you post to your Moodle instance, we do not keep anything. If you decide to close your account, you can take all of your content with you anywhere else. Once of the advantages of using Moodle is that they do not use proprietary authoring tools to create training.

If you need custom training designed and created, Jacobs, et al or Law Enforcement Training and Education Consultants can provide the full range and scope of training needs you may have. We will help you develop a strategy that includes hosting in a Moodle LMS or a MyQuest account all in one complete package.

You should always have at least two administrators with equal access to your LMS. That way, if you have a change of admins, you are not limited to their specific access. Always set up at least two super admins, and then create differing levels of control of your courses as you see fit.

While we do not limit the number of users or their access to your site, purely for managing data and database size and complexity, you should set a regular schedule of purging users from your database.

If you are planning on tracking user access and activity, set your purging schedule to be after you pull your data, then store the data in a spreadsheet. It will make it easier to manage data and users over time.