FormaLMS requires that the SQL databases uses utf8 collation as seem in https://docs.formalms.org/reference-guide-2/installation-and-upgrade/requirements.html My hosting is set to latin1 so unicode characters isn't handled correctly.
I had to use the "Collation" section of Operations tab on PHPMyAdmin to convert tables to utf8mb4_unicode_ci after Softaculous FormaLMS install.