User Reviews
EQUELLA by The Learning Edge International
USER REVIEWS - All reviews
Purchased Date: January 01, 2010
Principal Educational Technologist, Sydeny
May 11, 2010
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Pros
Equella is an exceptionally good learning content management system. It has support for all the key areas of need for content management and specifically for the education sector problem space. This includes, for example, support for online learning standards such as SCORM, federation with upstream repositories such as library systems an academic database collections via z39.50 and OAI and support for digital rights management.
Equella integrates out-of-the-box with 14 common learning management systems including the very popular Moodle This allows the content management disciplines of version control content state control (draft, live, archived, under review, etc) and collaboration (formal via workflow and informal via sharing) to be introduced to the otherwise 'content dumb' LMSs. It allows content to be indexed and metadata tagged and easily discovered, retrieved, modified, aggregated and published at will plus do so inside sophisticated access control capabilities.
Cons
It is a very powerful system and with power comes complexity. Equella ships with some very powerful core code and an extremely flexible configuration tool/layer that allows an educational institution to set it up to service its specific needs and business logics. This flexibility means that the institution can manage the application into the role it needs it to support without having to enter the expensive and risky world of software customisation. It takes effort and commitment but so does any serious endeavour.
There is also exceptionally good support available and very good docs.
Overall
Equella also allows organisations to connect multiple LMSs and other presentation environments to a single repository allowing efficiency gains via content sharing across multiple delivery environments. This can be combined with Equella-managed access to upstream content such that as content subscriptions come and go, the organisation doesn't need to reconstruct its educational technology systems architecture each time.
Equella is by far the best LCMS on the market at the time of writing. It is years ahead of anything else. We have implemented it and had enormous success doing so and I would recommend it to an Educational Technologist looking to manage content in an education institution.
