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Outline

Introduction on Tips Building an LMS

This is the last article on Online Education. I will underline some important areas that you must investigate if you want to run an Online School. The best Tip on building an LMS is to be always a student of your area of expertise, you must work hard and you have to know it.

The most popular free LMS is MOODLE. It can be integrated with WordPress via Bridge software. Here are the links:

Link to moodle.org   

Link to Bridge of WP

 other Tips on Building an LMS are:

General Tips on building an Online Education Site (LMS)

• You must study what competitors do.
• You need to speak with an Accountant for taxation
• You need to speak with a lawyer  for "Terms" and "Privacy" pages and other questions that a site is needed according to low
• And of course, you can have parallel courses on many educational sites.
• You must use many other sites, communities in order to promote your course (Facebook, YouTube, e.t.c).
• You must optimize your site, and build an SEO friendly site.
• you must be patient
• see what others do
• in your area of interest, you must study and know the majority of info
• to offer what the people need (solve problems in areas of big interest)
• validate the content, what is asking the market?
• do not forget the family
• do a little gymnastic
• have main targets  and minor (keep a diary)
• if a task is difficult then break it in smaller tasks
• to take feedback (how many see your article/course, with Google Analytics is away)
• how may stars give to your course?   
• communicate with students to learn what is not good for them
• all we do mistakes and we have failures, but we learn and we have progressed at the end. Since a lot of people create LMS sites then everyone can create, the quality is coming with experience, clear thinking, few lessons, and the help of God.
• work with love

others tips on building an LMS are: 

You are going to build the site or you are going to hire an engineer?

• Can you build the site, if you have the knowledge do it and refactor it until you make it as good as you can?
• There are many sites with prebuild option, just click and the site is ready, then update, delete, add info.
• Or find a web engineer, to make the site.

What is your budget -Tips on building an Online Education Site (LMS)?

• You need to pay for the LMS software, the domain name, the hosting company, the hosting company of videos, the PayPal or other payment gateway (per sales amount of money), and programs like Video editing and capture for your lessons.
• Some programs we pay one's a year or more years depending on what we want.
• There are also expenses of the Template, plugins/extensions, the payment of web developers, and possible support contracts.

What is your site content -Tips on building an Online Education Site (LMS)?

• You want to produce or/and offer pdf books?
• Do you want to have a blog?   (can you write articles or you will have to pay?)
• What form of lessons are you going to have? (video, text, PowerPoint, photos with text, slides e.t.c)
• Do you want to have an Online Community?
• Do you want to offer support or making projects or writing plugins/themes?

So I wish all the future owners of Online Schools all the best in their efforts to create great sites.

Demo WordPress Installations  (there are few LMS installations full of Tips):

Follow the link

Outline

Introduction to Budget LMS', Part II

During my research for budget Learning Management Systems. I found and many other alternatives budget or not plugins or extensions of a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal). Also, there is CodeIgniter (CI), a PHP Framework used in the western world for Educational or Public Sectors' applications.  There are few of CI apps, I 've chosen the Academy Budget LMS.

In the first article  Part I, I 've spoken about:

• Moodle
• Joomla
• WordPress

Budget LMS solutions. In this second article Part II, I will speak about Drupal and CodeIgniter Budget LMS solutions. Also in the end I'll provide a retired WordPress Budget LMS, so If someone wants can write o fork, it is the famous CoursePress Pro, and two articles for WordPress and Joomla LMS'.

Some people create their own LMS' (Learning Management Systems), by configuring the CMS with many different plugins. It is up to you, many choices, many different solutions for a Budget LMS. 

Drupal Budget LMS'

From the  article  follow the link

Which is the Best Drupal distribution for LMS?

These might help your LMS selection

LMS (learning management system)
https://groups.drupal.org/lms-learning-management-system

Open Academy
https://www.drupal.org/project/openacademy

Opigno LMS
https://www.drupal.org/project/opigno_lms

Julio
https://www.drupal.org/project/julio

Comparison of these 3 distributions
http://opensource.com/education/14/9/3-drupal-distributions-education

ELMS Group
https://groups.drupal.org/elms

 In the Drupal ecosystem, some people create their own LMS.

Codeigniter Budget LMS'

CodeIgniter is a very popular Php Frameworks for Education.  If you follow the link, you can see many alternatives in https://codecanyon.net. For me, the best is the Academy LMS.

c)An article for Badget or not LMS' (just click the ilink):

Make your own fork: CoursePress Pro Update: As of May 2019, this plugin has been retired and is no longer supported by WPMUDev. They have published the code on Github for those technical types who might want to fork and maintain it for their needs.

Best LMS Joomla Extensions for 2021

Outline

Introduction 

How to offer? It depends on the type of Education. If it is about Programming, it is a practical material you must preset practical info. If it is about another question you may use PowePoint and speak as you speak to one of your friends. You may have music or not, you may have short or big paragraphs or videos or audio. After the article about some budget LMS's, I'd like, in this article, to give some info on how we must deliver Online Education.

There are some basic principles, on how to offer Online Education:

• Do what others do, what is popular, for example, WordPress is very popular 
• Validate that the content is popular, now in April 2020 everyone wants an Online School
• Do it with love, start from this that  you love
• keep mental space
• cooperate with one or more person to obtain expertise and gain the needed time to learn
• if you can not do a task  outsourced it
• have time for your family

Also, read this article with Tips On Creating An Online School

What is popular in order to know how to offer online education

You can validate the demand of the content by Google (keyword search), or on how many students are following the course in Udemy, e. t.c. There are a lot of services performing SEO research, and you can learn what people want and where. In general, you must solve problems with online education and you must help the people.

Online lessons on how to offer education

First I 'm going to give info about  a school (between others) that gives lessons on how to deliver:

ACS Online School on how to offer Online Education

ACS Online School follows the link. In principle is a good school to learn how to teach, if you are not a tutor.

Education Courses follow the link

Course on Delivering Distance Education follow the link

Udemy, Phil Ediner on how to offer Online Education

There are also a lot of good courses in many other places. I just want to mention the course from Udemy

of   Phil Ediner, it is really excellent.

Closing the article, I add this link on   Communication Skills

Outline

Introduction to Budget LMS'

For a few months, I have researched the market, in order to find a budget LMS. So below are the results of my study. There are LMS like Moodle who are free. And also LMS' that are extensions or plugins to popular CMS' like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. In this article, I 'll provide info about Moodle, Joomla, and WordPress Budget LMS'.

Moodle a FREE LMS

Go for moodle If you want to teach and not for a paid course, you can receive payments with a plugin (I think Paypal), if you want a budget LMS the easiest is to go with WordPress.

But If you already have Moodle and you want to make better the way of payment you must use WordPress or even Joomla. With WordPress, there are some solutions, the most used is the Edwiser Bridge. See the below video:

Site of Moodle

There are two budget LMS extensions using Joomla:

The first is   (it includes payment ways and cart), the Sp LMS.

Sp LMS follow the link

Sp LMS   

The second Budget LMS is  OScampus:

It has not a cart is good for paid memberships site, and is ok. Our site is built on this plugin:

OScampus doc follow the link 

Oscampus       

Other Budget or not Budget LMS' based on Joomla

It follows the article for Best Joomla LMS'

There are also two budget solutions using WordPress:

Are LearnPress and WPLMS (for a lot of people the second has better support)

About WPLMS

For WPLMS Themeforest online market  follow the link                              For WPLMS  home follow the link

For WPLMS  see 

About LearnrPress

For Learnpress follow the link:                                                                For Learnpress home follow the link

Other LMS' based on WordPress

It follows the article for  Best WordPress LMS'

Do not forget to see  Part II of Budget LMS'

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• What is CodeIgniter?
• Site of CodeIgniter
• What is CodeIgniter MVC?
• In CodeIgniter MVC have three basic classes:
• For Codeigniter MVC
• Other Articles

Introduction

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework, it is good for a small team of programmers (1-2) and you can write very fast applications. Another popular framework is Laravel. There is a special way/pattern to write code the MVC.  This article explains the implementation of MVC in CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter is used a lot in countries like India, Indonesia, and this area. In the western world is used for educational projects. The implementation of MVC in CodeIgniter is easy and good for a newbie to understand.

What is CodeIgniter?

It is a PHP Framework that people use for Educational Apps. A Framework has commands that are a summary of more commands in Vanilla PHP.

Site of CodeIgniter

Follow link

What is CodeIgniter MVC?

It is a pattern that we use in order to manipulate data in some languages like Java, Javascript, PHP e.t.c and it used from some PHP Frameworks like Codeigniter, Laravel e.t.c. MVC it separates the logic layer from the presentation layer.

In  CodeIgniter MVC we have three basic classes:

a) Controller (who is doing the management)

b) View (who presents the data)

c) Model (who speaks with the database, in our case MySQL, and fetches the info).

How MVC works:

The browser speaks with the controller.

Then the Controller looks at the Cache if the info exists. If YES controller uses the View to present it ( HTML + CSS + Bootstrap +JS)

If info does not exist, then Controller speaks with Model, Model with Database and returns the info to Controller, the Controller uses the View to present the info to Browser and updates the cache.

 In CodeIgniter, we also use Helpers, Libraries, and all the staff that this framework has. For example, we first must load the Database in order to use it with the specific command or by editing the autoload script.

Abstract to programming Languages

There are a lot of types of languages

At the very beginning of my studies, we were writing assembly language which is a low-level language. (around 1983)

We were using COBOL, which is a human-like programming language, after the appearance of Databases, like Oracle, we were able to write in PRO*COBOL. The last speak with databases.

We have a language with Compiler, he creates assembly from the language. For example from C human writer source, we create an assembly file, this file is our binary program.

We have a language with Interpreter, he is the layer that makes the source, human-written code, to communicate with the computer. Languages with an interpreter are Java, PHP, e.tc. 

We have 4th generation languages, that are with Forms & Reports GUI and sit on the top of o Database like Oracle.

After the explosion of WEB, we have languages, frameworks and CMS's

Speaking about PHP Family 

FREE Gimp Book + Save For Web plugin

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• At Udemy has a course about Gimp 2.8, it is FREE and includes (see the above image):
• I want to say that I am not affiliated with Udemy or the author.

Introduction

In 2009 I bought PhotoShop from an Internet e-shop. At that time I was in Greece. Then I learned that if someone brings PS from the US, or buys from the internet is not legal and he is going to pay a penalty. One PhotoGrapher had bought PS  from America, when they found him he paid a lot.  This is very bad you buy, you pay a penalty and you can not use it (PS). So I decided to learn an alternative software and this is GIMP.

As you know that a FREE alternative to PhotoShop is Gimp and Save For Web is a plugin of GIMP.  Gimp has many plugins, Themes, and other staff. A way to optimize an image in order for our site to be fast is to install the Save For Web Plugin and use it. This Lessons of Udemy offers all FREE.

Site of Gimp

Site

See out PATH for GIMP 

PATH

In this PATH has the Tutorial about Save For WEB

Tutorial

At Udemy has a course about Gimp 2.8, it is FREE and includes (Gimp, Save For Web):

--- video lessons

--- the famous plugin Save For Web + Gimp version that works  (and other plugins), this plugin can be used to optimize images for Web

--- a book about GIMP.

I want to say that I am not affiliated with Udemy or the author. I am a student at Udemy, but I try to help the people who want a FREE solution for their work.

Outline

Characteristics of Drupal

Drupal is the less popular is more difficult but has the best reputation, the below are it is main characteristics to learn it demands more time and effort, but if you love it to do it. If not it is ok. In the article, I  include the 19  main characteristics of Drupal, of course, it has more elements but you can read articles, see videos buy books, and course. If you want to learn about Drupal and its man characteristics you must read and play with it.

Comparing with WordPress is difficult

--- little difficult

Drupal is less popular

--- less popular (3,4 % CMS market)

It is FREE

--- Free

It is secure an important Drupal characteristic

--- most secure 

more main characteristics are:

It includes Cache functionality, main characteristic

--- Includes Cache functionality

It has its own Post Types also this is an important Drupal characteristic

-- includes post types

It includes deactivated Forum

---includes forum

It is proper for big and small projects

--- proper for  big scale projects

more  characteristics of Drupal are:

It is written in PHP

--- written in PHP, HTML, CSS, JS 

It uses responsive templates

--- templates using Bootstrap 

It has free plugins and Themes

--- it has less of free Plugins & Templates

It is difficult to write a Theme or modify a Theme comparing with WordPress

--- it is using for every theme part a copy of the base theme file with the new modifications

It uses SEO links

–- it uses SEO URLs

Drupal is light

–- it is  light (faster)

more characteristics of Drupal  are:

Like WordPress, we can secure and optimize it via .htaccess

-– it includes SEO functionality , Optimization & Security to edit .htaccess

Comparing with WordPress has less community support

--- less  community support (since is less popular)

It is mobile friendly

-- Mobile-friendly (characteristic of Drupal)

Drupal can be used for a blog or e-shop

-- Blogging 

-- Ecommerce

Introduction 

Joomla is less popular compared with WordPress, and a little difficult. In this article are the main Characteristics of Joomla, maybe to be more. This is a fast picture of this CMS. It has less support but you can find whatever you need. On the other hand, Drupal is still more difficult from the three. Joomla has its characteristics as every CMS. It is a matter of choice, every CMS has friends, and at the end of the day, the important is to have done your work with love, because love gives quality. I am using Joomla for this site. So follow the Characteristics of Joomla in a list format.

Joomla is less easy comparing with WordPress

-- less easy 

some other characteristics of Joomla are:

It has a smaller portion on the market than WordPress

--- popular (5,2% CMS market)

It is free

--- Free

It is secure

--- Secure 

It includes Cache Functionality

--- Includes Cache functionality

It is proper for communities

--- proper for communities

some other characteristics of Joomla are:

It is written in PHP

--- written in PHP, HTML, CSS, JS (it uses MVC model)

Joomla has templates written in Bootstrap

--- templates using Bootstrap or other Frameworks of CSS

Comparing with WordPress, Joomla has fewer Plugins & Themes

--- it has less of free Plugins & Templates

Joomla does not use Child Themes, it uses Overwrites

--- it uses Overwrites for local template customization (so that to not overwritten from update)

It contains SEO technology

–- it uses URL configuration to create SEO URLs

some other characteristics of Joomla are:

Via .htaccess we can optimize, secure and add SEO functionality

-– it includes SEO functionality , Optimization & Security to edit .htaccess

Joomla has few sites hacked

–- Only 3% of sites hacked (2018)

Joomla, comparing with WordPress, has smaller Community Support

--- less  community support

It is mobile friendly

-- mobile-friendly

It has extensions

-- for webshops

-- Learning Management Systems (like our site)

-- and more