Activate LMS

What Activate LMS is

Activate LMS is a Danish learning management system for companies, municipalities and other organizations that need to send e-learning to their staff, follow up and document who has finished it. It is built and run by Elearningspecialist, a Danish e-learning company that also produces courses and explainer videos for clients and teaches workshops on authoring tools such as Articulate Rise, Storyline and Vyond. The LMS is the part of that business a training team buys as software.

The product page sums it up in Danish as "et enkelt og driftssikkert dansk Learning Management System: e-learning, SCORM, tracking, certifikater og automatisk brugerhåndtering. Support inkluderet." (a simple and reliable Danish learning management system: e-learning, SCORM, tracking, certificates and automatic user management, support included). Its headline promise is an LMS "uden kompleksitet I aldrig bruger" (without complexity you never use). The FAQ confirms it is delivered only as SaaS and only as a cloud solution, so there is nothing to install, run or maintain on your own servers.

Running training in Activate LMS

The everyday work is distributing courses and following up. Administrators upload e-learning modules, send messages to users and decide whether a course is mandatory or voluntary. Several modules can be combined into a course, and courses can be grouped and reused for different groups of employees. Assignment can be automatic for whole groups of users.

Much of the administration is meant to run on its own. The page lists automatic creation, editing and deletion of users; automatic assignment of courses based on a user's organization and/or job function; automatic emails with course diplomas, news of new courses, or reminders when someone has missed a deadline; and automatic registration and reporting of results. The company says it has built setups that have run for several years without anyone needing to look after them.

From the learner's side, the usual pattern is an email saying training is ready, after which the employee logs in on a smartphone, tablet or computer and completes the course. While they work, the LMS tracks their answers and how long they spend, and tracking lets them resume where they left off.

Reporting covers the status of each learner (not started, in progress, completed, passed, failed), their answers to questions and the time spent on a course. Administrators can see who has finished and send reminders to those who have not, or let the system do that automatically. For compliance training the FAQ says you can distribute compliance e-learning and documents, set up automatic follow-up so the training gets completed, and pull reports that document compliance. The page names structured onboarding, compliance and product training as typical uses, or simply assigning one course to every employee.

One feature aims at companies that train other companies. Activate LMS can manage e-learning for several sets of employees, companies or customers from one installation, and each customer gets its own logo so the platform feels like theirs. With what the company calls external SCORM packages (also known as SCORM proxy), your modules can appear inside a customer's own LMS while still living in Activate LMS. You update a course by uploading the new version once, with no need to send files to the customer, and you can close a customer's access to a course directly in Activate LMS.

Content, standards and languages

Activate LMS is a SCORM compatible LMS that supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. The FAQ says courses made in Articulate Storyline, Articulate Rise and Adobe Captivate run once they are exported to either version, and ready-made courses from other suppliers work too; the page names Office courses from GoLearn as an example. It explains SCORM as the standard that makes e-learning "plug and play", so content can move from one LMS to another and off-the-shelf courses can be bought in.

The system is not a full authoring tool. You can build quizzes and tests inside it, but for e-learning courses with more advanced functionality the company recommends pairing it with Articulate Storyline or Rise. Building that content is also something Elearningspecialist sells as a separate service.

Multilingual courses get particular attention. You can upload different language versions of a course to the same module and mark which language each one is in, for example English, German or Chinese, so one module serves every language without separate course assignments and separate reports. The FAQ lists the languages the system itself supports as Danish, English, Icelandic, Greenlandic, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Polish, Chinese, Arabic (UAE), Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian and Spanish, with more available on request.

On devices, the FAQ says Activate LMS supports most newer phones (iPhone, Android), tablets (iPad and Android) and ordinary Windows and macOS computers. Mobile learning works both as responsive content, for example built in Articulate Rise, and as scaled content from Storyline or Captivate.

There is deliberately no gamification. The FAQ says the company does not believe in gamified learning platforms and would rather help build game elements into the course content itself, keeping the platform focused on being easy to use.

Users, sign-on and hosting

Users can be created in four ways, which can be combined: automatic synchronization from a directory such as Active Directory, a spreadsheet or CSV import (recommended when there are many users), manual creation by people with the right permissions, and self-registration. The FAQ says many customers open self-registration for external users such as suppliers. Synchronization from Active Directory, Azure AD and Microsoft Office 365 is confirmed, and the product page also names Azure Entra. Single sign-on is supported, and the homepage says the company helps with setup, users and single sign-on.

Hosting is in Microsoft Azure, with data stored in a data center in Holland. The page says personal data and GDPR are taken care of, and the FAQ links to the company's GDPR policy.

Selling courses is possible as a custom setup. Activate LMS can be connected to your own webshop, where you handle payment; once payment is received, the Activate LMS API gives the buyer access to the e-learning they bought. This is sold as a customization, quoted on request.

Prices, demo and support

The product page title gives the starting price: from 12.000 kr. a year. For larger organizations the company offers a group LMS (koncern-LMS) at 98.500 kr. a year for up to 5.000 users. A separate price list page holds the full breakdown.

A free demo takes about 30 minutes in an online meeting, and afterwards you can get demo access to test the system yourself. Online documentation lives in a help center on Zendesk, including a basic feature overview.

Support is part of the price. The page says free super-user support comes with every customer because the system has some advanced options that can need extra explanation. For organizations that want to hand over the work entirely, LMS Totalservice means the company takes care of setup, administration, uploading content, configuring emails, running campaigns and setting up reports.

Customer quotes back up the support angle. Gregers Pedersen, Head of Group HR at Per Aarsleff A/S, says on the homepage: »Vi har valgt Activate LMS, fordi systemet er enkelt og ligetil at bruge. Vi får den hjælp, vi har brug for.« (We chose Activate LMS because the system is simple and straightforward to use. We get the help we need.) On the product page he adds that his team especially likes automatic user creation, single sign-on and delivering courses in several languages. Mattis Noot Ishøy of Saville Consulting Danmark describes a "tårnhøjt serviceniveau" (sky-high service level) throughout their setup.

Where the company draws the line

The company is candid about the limits. It does not consider Activate LMS suited to schools. It is not built for synchronous remote teaching, and the FAQ says to use Teams, Skype, GotoMeeting, Zoom or similar for online meetings rather than building meeting features into the learning system. It is not ideal for managing physical classes either: it is purely a digital learning platform, although the company says it plans to add support for classroom teaching with instructors, participants and rooms.

Who it suits

Activate LMS fits Danish companies, corporate groups and municipalities that already have SCORM e-learning, or plan to buy or commission it, and want it distributed, tracked and reported with as little manual work as possible. The automation around users, assignment by job function, diplomas and reminders is the core of the offer, and included super-user support suits teams without a learning technologist. The multilingual module handling makes it a sensible choice for organizations with staff who need the same course in several languages, and the multi-customer setup with own logos and SCORM proxy suits training providers serving several client companies.

It suits teams less well if they want to build rich courses inside the LMS, run live virtual classrooms or manage in-person sessions, or want gamified features such as leaderboards. Schools are better served elsewhere, as the company itself says.