Academy Of Mine As An Alternative, Learning Management System, Online Training System, Professional Training
A Better Alternative To TovutiLMS For Professional Development
Much like purchasing a house, finding the perfect learning management system is a long-term investment. The average LMS costs around $10,000 a year, and that’s before setup and customization costs. Let’s also not forget how many weeks if not months it can take to get your training programs up and running.
Now you may be thinking, “If only choosing an LMS was easier”. That’s a fair point, and since there are over a thousand LMSs on the market, deciding between even just two LMSs can be difficult.
So, in this article, we’re going to compare two well-known learning management systems: TovutiLMS and Academy Of Mine LMS!
Advantages of TovutiLMS
Mobile app
TovutiLMS has a mobile application for iOS and Android. More importantly, this means that every feature and function inside of TovutiLMS is mobile responsive. Although Academy Of Mine (AOM) is optimized for mobile, they currently don’t have a mobile application, so if learners are using a mobile device with the LMS, they have to go through an internet browser.
Extensive Webinar Support
If your company is training employees with virtual classrooms, then it’s important for your LMS to integrate with your preferred webinar tool. So, if your company does weekly meetings using MS teams or Zoom, your LMS should connect with the webinar tool to improve the process; from scheduling meetings to reporting on attendance and sending reminders of upcoming classes, webinar integrations smoothen the process for both administrators and learners.
Talking specifically about Tovuti’s webinar integrations, they support a lot of tools.
Some TovutiLMS webinar integrations:
- Zoom
- MS Teams
- Blue Jeans
- BigBlueButton
- Cisco Webex
In comparison, Academy Of Mine connects with Zoom, MS Teams, Go-To-Training, and a few more tools.
Community Feature
Tovuti has an interesting community feature that works as a mini social media platform for learners to engage with each other on the platform. Learners can post updates with text, pictures, and videos for other learners to comment on—there are also different groups inside of the community for learners to engage in specific niches. The Tovuti community feature is a great social learning tool for cohorts of learners to chat with each other while going through training at the same time.
Great Visual Aesthetic
If you’re looking for a learning management system that’s attractive, TovutiLMS is worth mentioning. Although the animations and good-looking dashboards in TovutiLMS don’t necessarily reflect functionally, the platform looks good. From completion status modules to sidebar menus and other buttons in the interface, Tovuti packs a hard punch when it comes to visual aesthetics.
Multilingual Support For Learners
Tovuti’s multilingual support allows learners to choose from 11 different languages while training. As opposed to traditional language translation in an LMS, multilingual support allows learners to change the language of their platform without affecting other users in the LMS. Alternatively, Academy Of Mine supports language translations on a global level but doesn’t offer multilingual support for learners. This means that only admins can change the site’s language, and this impacts all users.
Since Tovuti supports 11 different languages, you could theoretically have 11 learners inside of the system, all training in a different language.
A few of the languages that TovutiLMS supports:
- English (US)
- Spanish (ES)
- French (FR)
- German (DE)
- Japanese (JP)
Disadvantages of TovutiLMS
Pricing Based On User-Count
Tovuti’s prices start at $775 and that only lets you have 50 users, which is expensive in comparison to what you get from competitors like Academy Of Mine. All things considered, if you’re offering professional development to more than 50 users, you will need to upgrade to the $999 monthly plan at TovutiLMS.
For small-medium businesses with under 50 employees, TovutiLMS could make sense for you, especially with all of the features they include. On the other hand, if you’re selling training to other organizations (corporate training) you should consider other LMSs that are less restrictive in terms of user count.
Limited Reporting Features
Another common complaint about TovutiLMS is that their reporting can be limited. One specific reporting feature that’s important in eLearning is progress tracking. This is important so that learners can maintain their progress in courses, and admins can keep track of how learners are doing in training. Progress tracking is such a common reporting feature in eLearning that it is a bit worrying that Tovuti doesn’t have it. With Academy Of Mine, learners can easily see what percentage they’ve completed in a course, which modules they have completed, how much time they’ve spent on the course, and much more!
Steep Learning Curve To The LMS
By definition, a learning management system is a tool used to help manage learning and training programs. When an LMS is designed well, it not only helps admins manage training but also helps learners access and complete training online.
All things considered, it’s counterproductive for an LMS to be difficult to learn. Most customers have a lot of good things to say about TovutiLMS, but a common complaint is that the software takes a lot of time to learn—even then the software can be overwhelming with how many clicks it takes to do simple things.
We recommend watching Tovuti’s demo to get an idea of how their platform works.
In the next section of this article, we’re going to talk more about Tovuti’s admin dashboard, which may explain why TovutiLMS can be tough to learn and use.
Admin Dashboard Is Complex
Since TovutiLMS is packed with so many features, performing simple actions can sometimes become difficult. Here’s what a TovutiLMS customer said about the platform –
“Sometimes there are just far too many button clicks to do something that could be simpler. Too many stones to unturn to accomplish something.”
Every learning management system is designed differently and built for a different purpose; our belief at Academy Of Mine is that administering training should be easy to do with an LMS. Alternatively, some LMS platforms have more features than you need, but this makes the platform overwhelming and complex for admins. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong way to build an LMS, but in comparison to Academy Of Mine, Tovuti is not as user-friendly and easy to manage!
Here’s what a customer from a different review site said about Tovuti LMS –
“It’s SO complex and so robust that there are sometimes TOO many button clicks to accomplish something, or you have to turn over far too many stones to find something.”
No Free Trial
Although Tovuti does a good job of documenting its platform’s features online, they don’t offer a free trial. This means that you need to invest in a $10,000 annual plan before being able to try out the platform yourself. On the bright side, TovutiLMS has some different prerecorded demonstrations of the platform online for you to see how it works.
The LMS we’re comparing TovutiLMS with—Academy Of Mine—offers a 30-day trial to customers who are interested. AOM also offers monthly plans, but if you want to pay using an annual contract, you get a discounted rate.
Expensive Pricing Plans
Tovuti’s pricing doesn’t let you pick and choose which features you would like. For example, the difference between Tovuti’s $ 775-a-month pricing and their $ 1,500-a-month pricing is in how many users you can have. Tovuti does offer a la carte pricing, but that’s for additional features. Meaning, if you don’t need some of the features that Tovuti includes in the lowest pricing option, there’s no way to get a price reduction.
Tovuti also charges a minimum of $2,500 as a setup fee for their LMS.
No Course Reminders
Being able to remind learners of upcoming courses and virtual training classes is important in eLearning. That way, you can maximize the attendance and engagement of your learners. Unfortunately, TovutiLMS doesn’t have course reminders baked into their system. At Academy Of Mine, you can remind learners of upcoming webinars and classes, x number of hours before training starts (with an email notification). With AOM, you can also remind learners when a certificate or course is about to expire.
Advantages of Academy Of Mine (AOM)
The Lowest Price Plan Offers 250 Users
At Academy Of Mine (AOM), the lowest price plan starts at $599 and gives you 250 users. This is nearly $200 cheaper than Tovuti and gives you five times as many users. When setting up the LMS, AOM gives you 8 hours of onboarding support for free, and if you need help migrating from an existing LMS, they include that in their custom plan pricing.
Here are some of the features included in the $599 plan at Academy Of Mine:
- 250 active users
- 500 GB storage (75GB for SCORM)
- 25 B2B Portals
- Course authoring with quizzes, assignments, surveys, and more.
- Sell courses with eCommerce
- Learner reporting
- Live-virtual training with webinar tools, and other integrations.
If you’re training many users at once, Academy Of Mine’s $999 price plan gives you 1,000 users!
The LMS Is Easy To Manage
A well-designed LMS should have a small learning curve for all users so that admins can get training programs up and running quickly.
Learning management systems should also help your company report on training, author courses, and perform other administrative tasks involved with eLearning. A poorly designed learning management system will interfere with managing training online rather than improve it. One of the strengths of Academy Of Mine is their LMS is easy to manage. The general consensus from customers is that most features are easy to get behind and don’t take much time to perform.
Here is what one of AOM’s customers said in 2022 –
“We found AOM’s platform to be easy to use as a learner and easy to manage as an admin. Team members of all different skill sets have enjoyed building content and have quickly mastered the easy-to-use course builder.”
Remember, just because an LMS is ‘easy to manage’ for one company doesn’t mean every company will feel that way. Two things that influence how an admin feels about managing an LMS are:
- The type of training being administered on a platform.
- A company’s past experience with eLearning.
Unlike at Academy Of Mine, a common complaint from customers at Tovuti is that their dashboards can overcomplicate things.
Academy Of Mine LMS Is Simple For Learners
In the case of an LMS, if a platform is not user-friendly—and learners are having issues as a result of poorly designed software—the administrator can only help out so much. While the Academy Of Mine LMS doesn’t have advanced gamification, or the same aesthetic as Tovuti, the platform is easy to use and intuitive for learners.
From logging in to the LMS using company credentials (SSO) to plowing through a training course and managing your progress, Academy Of Mine customers appreciate how easy it is for their learners to use the platform.
Custom Development Plans
With the Academy Of Mine Enterprise plan, customers get customized monthly pricing (based on their requirements), and this plan includes custom features and integrations. Let’s say that you need to customize a reporting feature or make a design adjustment that’s not possible by default in the LMS, AOMs developers can custom develop this for you!
Reliable & Effective Support
Even though you would expect most tech companies to prioritize customer support nowadays that’s just simply not the case! Lucky for you, at Academy Of Mine, known for giving customers a reputation for going out of their way to help support customers’ growing needs. Whether this means resolving common technical support issues or specifying custom development that a customer wants on their platform, Academy Of Mine has reliable and effective support.
Simple But Effective Learner Reporting
If there’s one feature that’s extremely important in an LMS, it’s performance and attendance reporting. Why? Because you don’t want to just dish out training without being able to see what learners are doing…The Academy Of Mine LMS automatically keeps track of completion records, attendance, scores, and time spent on activities, and organizes all of this data for admins to report on in one place.
Here are some questions that Academy Of Mine learner reporting could help you answer:
- What courses are learners enrolled in?
- How much progress is a learner making in a course?
- What certifications does a learner have?
- How are learners responding to a written assignment?
- What’s the average score learners are getting in training?
- Are there any learners not engaging in training or not attending training at all?
In this recent AOM podcast episode, the company talks with an instructional designer about the importance of reporting on training with an LMS.
Disadvantages Of Academy Of Mine
Limited Gamification
Academy Of Mine offers some gamification features like leaderboards, badges, and a course points system, but the functionality is very basic. With Academy Of Mine, you can assign badges and award points to learners for completing different tasks, and then learners can compete with other learners via a leaderboard. That said, TovutiLMS and other LMS competitors have more animated and advanced gamification that may be more fun for learners.
Limited Language Support
Admins logged into Academy Of Mine can choose from 4 different languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. Additionally, when companies want to translate their LMS to another language, Academy Of Mine can custom translate the site for them. AOMs language translation feature is only available for admins at the moment. Meaning, admins can change the LMS language globally, meanwhile, learners cannot change the language of their training (multilingual support).
No Mobile App
Academy Of Mine currently doesn’t have a mobile app for iOS or Android, however, they do support mobile and smart devices via an internet browser.
Why You Should Choose Academy Of Mine LMS
The purpose of this article was to educate you on the pros and cons of TovutiLMS and Academy Of Mine LMS since neither of them is perfect. Still, when it comes to B2B training, administering training simply, and giving learners a platform that’s easy to train online, Academy Of Mine is the better choice.
It’s hard to know 100% if you’re a good fit for Academy Of Mine without talking to you directly — give us a call and let’s talk about your training needs!