Determine how many courses, students, authors and editors you need to support. Find out whether or not your learning management system needs to deliver complete courses online or if it will be used to augment class instruction. If you need to host a dozen courses for use by a couple of hundred students, and you will only have one writer for all those courses, you may find that you can simply create your courses on one of the many free or low-cost learning management systems online. If you can avoid having to install and maintain your own learning management system, you will find you save a great deal of time and money. Learning management systems that need to support thousands of students and hundreds of courses will require a dedicated server or servers and people or businesses to administrate them.
Determine whether you want to use a turnkey, proprietary learning management system which is maintained by a business that specializes in that task, or if you want to use an open-source learning management system you and your system administrators install and support on your own web servers. A turnkey, proprietary learning management solution may be best if you really want to have no involvement in hardware or software administration. You may pay a premium for the service you receive, but you will not have to worry about unexpected costs for system upgrades or lost data. The company that you use will manage multiple systems and will address these issues in house. If you want to be able to customize your learning management system, and if you want to use your own in-house system administrators and support personnel to reduce training costs, an open-source solution may work best. You'll spend more time setting your system up, but it will probably cost less to maintain, and you'll have direct control over the user experience.
Determine who will be responsible for training your learning content developers, your students and your teachers if required. If you work with a proprietary learning management system, chances are the company that creates and hosts the system will train some or all of your users. If you host your own learning management solution, you will identify a senior editor or webmaster who will provide orientation and training for your first users.
Determine what you will do with your data in years to come. If you are a large institution, like a university or hospital, you will be living with the content in the learning management system for a long time. Choosing an open-source learning management solution may be the best solution because it gives you complete control over your data over time. If you only plan to host courses for a small business, you may find that your attachment to your courses isn't as strong. Speed of deployment and ease of use may be your key considerations. A proprietary system may work best.
Once you have made these initial determinations, you will be able to find and evaluate relevant solutions online. Searching for "open-source learning management systems" and "hosted learning management systems" should give you many options to choose from. Make sure that you carefully research how current users of each solution like each learning management system. Evaluate the costs not just of the software, but also for installation, training and system administration. Make sure you calculate how much it will cost to move any of your current training materials into the new system. You will find that it takes just a few days to narrow your choices down to the final candidate.