Edwiser RemUI vs. New Learning Moodle Theme: Which One is Best for Your Moodle Site

Tejas Patil

Are you looking for the perfect Moodle theme to build your eLearning website?

If yes, then you must have come across two themes that are quite popular in the Moodle ecosystem: Edwiser RemUI and New Learning. 

Both these themes are known for their easy setup, user-friendly UI, and robust customer support provided by their developers. In such a situation, choosing one of them becomes a little difficult. 

However, your search may be coming to an end here. Because in this article we will compare Edwiser RemUI and New Learning themes to figure out which one is best for your eLearning site. Let’s begin!

#1. Layout and UI

When you look at the UI of both Edwiser RemUI and New Learning side-by-side, it’s easier to see that Edwiser RemUI looks more polished and well-designed than the New Learning theme. The typography, color schemes, frames, and other visual elements look much better designed in the demos of Edwiser RemUI than in the demos of New Learning.

Edwiser RemUI demo

However, that doesn’t mean New Learning doesn’t have any good and modern-looking demos. Some released recently demos (i.e. Language School, Course Hub Creative, School Classic, and School Creative) are also quite well-designed and eye-pleasing. 

As far as using the pre-built demos is concerned, both themes come with a demo importer that can be used to import your desired demo with a single click. Now let’s see how both themes fare in terms of the number of layouts and responsiveness.

New Learning theme demo

Number of layouts

While it’s possible to create a new layout from scratch in both these themes, it can be quite time-consuming. Therefore, it’s always better and time-saving to use the pre-designed layouts that come with the demos of themes. 

That’s why the number of pre-designed layouts included in a theme can also affect the kind of website you can set up, making it an important factor.

As far as Edwiser RemUI and New Learning are concerned, here are the number of layouts offered by both themes for various purposes:

New Learning

• 7 different homepage layouts
• 4 different course page layouts
• 6 course enrollment page layouts
• 2 course index page layouts
• Single login page layout

Homepage layouts included in New Learning

Edwiser RemUI

• 7 homepage layouts
• 6 course page layouts
• Single course enrollment page layout
• Single course index page
• Single login page layout.

Responsiveness

Both New Learning and Edwiser RemUI are 100% responsive themes that claim to work on any device or screen size. 

Overall, we can say that the interface of Edwiser RemUI looks more modern and polished than the interface of New Learning. But at the same time, New Learning offers more layout options for course enrollment pages and index pages. 

#2. Navigation

Navigation is also a very important factor to consider while choosing an eLearning theme because it affects the whole learning experience. If it’s difficult to navigate between the various pages of a website, no one would want to learn from it. 

Now, the navigation of a typical eLearning website consists of 2 parts. What are those parts, and how Edwiser RemUI and New Learning fare on them, has been explained below.

Navigation inside courses

The most important part is navigation inside courses. The students must be able to switch to different modules and exercises within a course without a lot of effort. Edwiser RemUI takes special care of it by including a dedicated sidebar for the purpose that can be used for navigating to any part of the course. 

The course navigation panel in Edwiser RemUI

New Learning theme also includes this feature, and it’s called “Table of Contents” by them. The table exists on the right side or left side of the course page depending on which layout you choose, and it also comes in a variety of designs as you can see below. Moreover, it also shows the course progress of students. 

Table of contents in New Learning

This functionality makes navigating inside the courses much easier in both of these themes. Students can easily navigate to any exercise or course module. 

Jumping between courses

After navigating inside the course, the next thing that matters is jumping between various courses. The All Courses page of Edwiser RemUI makes it quite simple as it provides filters to sort your courses along with a search bar right above the list of courses. You can filter your courses on the basis of categories and you can also sort your courses in alphabet order.

All Courses page of Edumy

It doesn’t end there. You can also switch between grid view, list view, and a summary view of courses on this page from the icons given in the filter bar itself. All these features make finding your desired courses an easy affair. 

The New Learning theme also provides these navigation features, but they are limited. You can filter your courses on the basis of categories, instructors, or prices only from a sidebar. You also have a search option, and that’s it. The view is also limited to Grid view only. 

Course Index page of New Learning theme

There’s also an A-Z index of courses that organizes courses in alphabet order, as you can see below. This type of view is not included in Edwiser RemUI, but you can sort your courses in alphabet order by using the Sort dropdown so a separate view is not needed for that. 

A-Z course index pages of New Learning theme

Overall we can say that the navigation features provided by New Learning are enough for anyone to find their desired course, but they are not as versatile as the features provided by Edwiser RemUI. 

#3. Customization capabilities

The customization capabilities of a theme depend largely on 4 things: a real-time customizer (also known as page builder sometimes), blocks available for customization, custom CSS and JS support, and custom color scheme and font support. Let’s see how both these themes perform on each of these criteria.

Live customizer

Edwiser RemUI has a drag-and-drop page builder called Visual Personalizer that allows you to create a webpage from scratch in minutes.

Edwiser RemUI Visual Personalizer

New Learning also has a page builder, but it works more like a Block editor than a page builder. You can add columns and then you can add different elements to them, instead of being able to directly drag and drop them anywhere on your page like Visual Personalizer of Edwiser RemUI.

Page Builder of New Learning

As a result, while in Edwiser RemUI you can easily create a page from scratch within seconds, in New Learning it can take some time. 

Customization blocks

The number of customization blocks included in a theme also affects how much freedom you have in designing your pages. Fortunately, Edwiser RemUI takes good care of that by providing us with a library of more than 150+ unique customization blocks that can be added to the page using its Visual Personalizer to design a site that looks just as you like it. 

The New Learning theme also includes a library of customization blocks in its page builder, but with far fewer blocks than the library of Edwiser RemUI. They have only 50+ blocks in the page builder offered by them. Nevertheless, they include all the popular ones like accordions, buttons, boxes, tabs, icons, etc.

Library of New Learning theme blocks

Custom CSS and JS support

Edwiser RemUI allows you to use Custom CSS and JS for doing almost any type of customization to your site’s appearance. Most of these changes can be applied from site settings. 

New Learning, on the other hand, doesn’t allow the use of custom CSS and JS to tweak the design of your site. You can do only as many customizations as permitted by its Live Page Builder and Settings. 

Custom color schemes and fonts

Finally, Edwiser RemUI also allows the site-wide use of custom color schemes and fonts to customize the overall appeal of your site as you like it. New Learning, on the other hand, doesn’t provide that much flexibility in choosing your own custom themes and color schemes. You can only use as many fonts and colors as included in the theme. 

Login page customization

Edwiser RemUI and New Learning both offer just one single page layout for the login page. However, the former allows you to completely alter the appearance of the login page as per your preferences, while the latter doesn’t. 

The customizable login page of Edwiser RemUI

If you choose Edwiser RemUI, you can not only change the color scheme, font, and contents of your login page but also the location where your login form appears on the page. Basically, despite having a single login page layout you can create a login page you like. None of this is possible with New Learning, and you must work with the login page that has been provided (which is not too bad actually). 

New Learning login page

#4. Compatibility and Support

A Moodle theme should also be compatible with various Moodle versions and multiple languages in order to provide a trouble-free experience to all its users. Its developers should also be reliable enough to support the site owners in case of a bug or a problem. Here’s how both these themes do in these criteria:

Moodle versions supported

Edwiser RemUI supports all Moodle versions starting from Moodle 3.0 to Moodle 4.1+, while New Learning supports versions from Moodle 2.7 to Moodle 4.1 and more. 

However, with legacy versions of Moodle (i.e. older than Moodle 3.6), you don’t get many of its new features and the support is also quite limited. For Moodle 2.7 – 3.6, New Learning provides only bug-fixing support. Also, you can only work with their Classic Page Builder instead of the new Live Page Builder. You get full support and Live Page Builder only with Moodle versions newer than 3.6. 

Edwiser RemUI, on the other hand, doesn’t provide any support for Moodle versions older than 3.7. That is because Moodle itself doesn’t provide any sort of support for these legacy versions, and there’s really no point in using them anymore. 

Multilingual support

Both Edwiser RemUI and New Learning support multilingual learning, which means that both of them can be used to publish eLearning content in any language. Both of them also include RTL (Right-To-Left) support, which means they can also publish content in right-to-left flowing languages like Arabic, Persian, etc. Both themes are also translation ready. 

Customer support quality and reliability

The customer support ecosystem of both themes is very strong. Both of them have almost entirely positive reviews on Themeforest and other websites, which says a lot about how impeccable their customer service experience has been. 

While New Learning has a rating of more than 4.5 stars even after selling 2,000 units on Themeforest, Edwiser RemUI is in a league of its own by having thousands of positive reviews on multiple websites (i.e. Quora, Moodle forums, etc). 

This is enough to tell that both themes are simply amazing in treating their customers the right way. In a nutshell, both Edwiser RemUI and New Learning are highly reliable themes and there’s no differentiation between them in this area. 

#5. Pricing

Both Edwiser RemUI and New Learning themes have a price of $69 per year. However, there’s a difference in what you get at this price point from both of them. 

With New Learning you get customer support for 6 months. If you need a full year of support, it costs an extra $33 to get it. Edwiser RemUI, on the other hand, provides support for a full year at no extra cost. 

Edwiser RemUI also has a lifetime license option that can allow you to use the theme for your whole life at a cost of $207 only. So basically, if you pay for 3 years of license at once then you can use it on any number of sites you want for the rest of your life. This option is not available with New Learning. 

The rest of what you get and what you don’t get can be seen at this price point and is clearly defined in the table given below. 

Final Thoughts: Which One to Choose?

Edwiser RemUI and New Learning — both of them offer something unique to their customers. While the former excels in terms of polished design, customization capabilities, and navigation, the latter has unique course enrollment pages and a less steep learning curve for the first-time user. 

We’d suggest that you give a try to the demos of both these themes to decide which of the themes will be best for your use case. Recently Edwiser RemUI also went through a major upgrade that has truly revamped its UI, making it even better than it has ever been. You can check out the demo here. The demo for New Learning can be accessed and checked out from here. 

Also Read: Edwiser RemUI vs. Edumy: Which Moodle™ Theme to Choose in 2023