Discourse can be used as a very effective LMS. I have been using it successfully for a couple of years now. We need some to develop a stable plugin that can order and organise the Topics under a category by Title.
So instead of the Activity column or just by clicking the Topic button, the posts under that category/sub-category are organised by Title numerically / alphabetically.
I have seen other posts requesting the same feature. I also know that the Docs plugin allows for that, but it is cumbersome due to our many courses. It adds extra steps to see the posts organized by title.
I looked into this a bit. In case anyone else[1] wants to take a crack at it, the Topic Voting plugin does allow sorting the topic list by votes. Seems like it would be relatively to use that plugin as inspiration and just sort by title.
Can you share a bit about how you use it as an LMS? Is it just for storing training or also some kind of workflow for monitoring who has done it? Anything else?
each topic is a lesson (which is what needs to be in chronological order)
That’s what Jon (in this thread) suggested by changing settings for each category and sub-category. Topics can be organised by the date created and in ascending/descending order.
So, to get around that, you can number the lessons and add them one after the other.
When I used discourse as an LMS I used a set of tags and likes to trigger custom badges that I used to generate grades (and I had a script that would update the grade book in git LMS that the university used.
I’ve been thinking about building some plugins to support learners. If there are specific issues you’re trying to solve you can email me and I’ll add them to my list.
However, since the subject matter that I teach is so vast, I needed something that would allow me to update the content and add new content very quickly + encourage interaction.
And discourse does both very well. I even use it as my blog, because I can simply copy past the edited blog post from Google Docs without doing much formatting in Discourse.
It has taken a year, but only now Google has started showing my discourse pages (public) in search results.
But the 2 biggest challenges that I had to overcome were:
Integration with my existing checkout service ThriveCart. So, even if I sold a subscription, it would automatically grant and revoke access + TC ingrates with “n” number of other services in backend. Which is what you initially worked on via Zapier for me. But it is cumbersome and, quite honestly, only useful if you have 1 product/course. The more products you have the more complicated it becomes and starts to fall apart. So I just got someone to build a custom portal for me as I have apps and Google Sheet add-ons that I need to give people access to as well.
Organising lessons in chronological order. Which is what I recently figured out how to do. I just have to plan them and even if I did not plan them I can change their published date and organise them that way.
I do not use any badges or grading system so I cannot comment about their use.