An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?

mandrake*rpgdx asks: "The college I work for is looking into creating an all in one online system for teachers and students to be able to take tests, give online courses and do other daily tasks. They are currently looking into the Blackboard system. Is there an FOSS alternative that I could suggest using at their next meeting?"

.LRN

http://dotlrn.org/ [dotlrn.org]

Re:.LRN

We are also looking at replacing Blackboard (now $7500/year for the smallest config) with dotLRN, which is actualy built on openACS. We already have blackboard exported courses importing into dotLRN, and have worked a little on making the dotLRN interface

Moodle?

I don't know the full capabilities of Blackboard but I would look into moodle [moodle.org] as an alternative.

Re:Moodle?

Blackboard is very primitive. I'm surprised they can actually sell it considering that it does not have many capabilities. At my school, hardly anybody uses it because one would have to restructure grading and so on around its very basic capabilities. I

Re:Moodle?

I'd say the main problem with free alternatives is really stupid project names. Moodle? WTF?

At least, unlike some projects, a Google search on "moodle" returns information relevant to the project. It used to be that a simple search for "postfix" returne

Re:Moodle?

Moodle is good stuff, especially considering there are tools to convert Blackboard to Moodle course converstion [linuxbox.com] and another utility to convert Moodle courses to a variety of formats. [linuxbox.com]

Sakai

From the Sakai Website [sakaiproject.org]:

The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education

As far as I know, creating an alternative to Blackboard is the primary focus of the project.

Re:Sakai

We looked at Sakai briefly - we determined that it's really just not usable for a small insititution. You need to have a lot of money and resources to pour into it to get it going. One day it will be great, but it's not ready yet.

Try Moodle [moodle.org] instead.

Re:Sakai

How so? I brought it up in an afternoon to just play around with. Granted PSU has a lot of money and resources, but I didn't use any of them :)

Finkployd

Re:Sakai

As a student of Virginia Tech, I've had a good deal of expierence with Blackboard. Now Tech, along with a few others, is now a partner in the Sakai project. I've spoken with some of the professors involved, and all of them seem to question whether or not the final project will be "Free" in any fashion (upper or lowercase).

What I would really look into is building atop the moodle project, although its not nearly as robust, it is completely open and adding to it is actually a breeze-- (we added in university authentication and SSL quite easily).

Moodle is proven more robust than Sakai

It's being used at New Zealand Poly with >40,000 users on a 4 unit cluster, for instance.

Sakai largest installation is uMich with 27,000 students (reportedly on 27 servers) Sakai's release notes call for a new server for every 2000 students.

Moodle has a gradebook, a quiz system, and many other tools that haven't been written yet in Sakai.

Moodle is being used at more than 4000 registered sites world wide, including a number of 10,000-20,000+ student systems.

And Moodle is built with the same technology that Yahoo chose as the best for a (really) large site: PHP.

You can check out Sakai at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakaiproject.org], join up and try the discussion tool out.

ALso see a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm [humboldt.edu] --note this is Moodle 1.3 vs. BB 6, Moodle 1.5 is due out in a few weeks with RSS, a wiki, a new gradebook, and extensive performance tuning by the NZVLE project.

TikiWiki?

TikiWiki [tikiwiki.org] has added many things over the years that could help with this.

Beyond that, maybe start with e.g. Horde [horde.org] and work from there?

Damien

word of advice...

if you're going before a school committee they most likely have their decision made already. if you want to seriously suggest an OSS alternative it may be a good idea to set up a test server, install it, play with it, learn the capabilities of the OSS programs, and be able to answer any questions they may throw at you.

uPortal

It's already in use by several Unis so it might be just what you are looking for. It's very customizable and you can even develop your own plugins.

iirc there are a few on sourceforge that arent bad

I was looking for a similar system a while back and I remember finding a few decent ones on sourceforge and freshmeat and those types of sites.

yes a couple

Try moodle http://moodle.org/ [moodle.org] about which i hear good things or possibly boddington http://bodington.org/ [bodington.org]

Sakai http://www.sakaiproject.org/ [sakaiproject.org] has come up on my radar recently and looks like it will certainly be the one for the future though i've no idea if it is good enough now.

For heavens sake try your hardest to avoid blackboard and webCT
They are expensive, crash all the time into non recoverable states, severly limit how you can deliver courses. Overall blackboard is the worst most expensive web software packages i have seen in a 5 year web application deployment career, i haven't seen webCT but everyone i talk to says if anything it is worse than blackboard. Having no VLE is almost better than having either of those 2.

Tips for educating yourself google for VLE (Virtual learning environment) MLE (managed learning environment) if your not up on the terminology.

Many to choose from

For pure open source, check moodle and sakai (sp?). For something that isn't F/OSS but is very customizable, check out Angel.

Personally, I never liked Blackboard. I learned WebCT back in its infancy (v 1.1, 1.something beta for Win32) after struggling with TopClass for a few months. We were up and running with 12 completely online classes (english, library science, biology, etc) in just 2 weeks using WebCT.

Also, I've been playing with Desire2Learn for a few months - they may be worthwhile in a few years, but not now.

Check with the powers-that-be regarding license costs, server costs (our new webct servers are gonna be about $22k each next fall), whos going to admin them, if publisher prepared courses are desireable (usually are by instructors, but usually include so much as to be overwhelming and therefore nearly useless), etc. Also consider that many of the big players (webct and bb included) can host courses for you on their servers, etc.

COSE

Not wholly Open Source, but have a look at COSE [staffs.ac.uk] from Staffordshire University. They plan a FOSS release in the future.

Éibhear

OSS = Free

I like how everyone who asks questions here is always like: "Can i get an open source solution to X?" When what they really mean is "Can I get a free solution to X?". They are almost never looking to contribute to or modify the project....which is fine, but lets say i knew of a free alternative to blackboard that wasn't open sourced...you're probably still interested right? Just be up front and say you want free.

Check out Logicampus

Last time I had to research this I found logicampus [logicampus.com] to be the best one out there.

Fenix

My university develops and uses it's own open source system, Fenix [ist.utl.pt]. It's actually quite cool, and handles much much more than that, including course applications, classes management, timetables, exams and workgroups management, etc. I'm just not sure if it's fully available in english. At least the site seems to be.

Interact

One of the most flexible packages I ever saw is Interact. I have tried some, but all of them seem too restricted to the model designed by the developer. So, for example, WebCT (whish I used some years ago) you have a place to put material, a place to do quizzes, but no way to make more "complex" arrangements of the capabilities. Interact, for example, operates using a "component" model. You have a number of components to choose from and you can group them in any way you like inside "Folders". Currently available components are: forum, group, dropbox, sharing, chat, journal, gradebook, quiz, folder, file, weblink, note, page, calendar, KnowledgeBase and NoticeBoard. Interact is aimed at being a complete school support system, as such, it has a unique student and teacher login for all the content, and each subject has its own "site". So teachers of a subject have administration priviledges on this subject's site, and students have access to all sites of the subjects they are currently taking. A neat feature is that each component has a unique ID, and it can be "shared" among different sites. So I can have two disciplines to share the same messages of a forum, for example. Components can be copied, as to use older subject's sites on a new subject too. Interact's site is http://cce-interact.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] where you can also find a demo to play with.

Blackboard is awful, but...

A fairly major part of my life is spent as a VLE administrator, using Blackboard. I've even been to conferences on the bloody thing. It's awful; everyone in the office hates it. It's a usability joke - our students can never find the things we put up there, and we can hardly blame them. Every major forum system on the internet today (phpBB, vBulletin, etc) whips the living hell out of it. The forum features are so archaic they discourage use. The navigational system is poor and confusing. The admin options are inconsistent: sometimes login-power-sensitive on the display pages, sometimes only available in a separate control panel. Everything takes at least 2 more clicks than it needs to.

However, it is very firmly embedded in academia, and I suspect you'll have a hard time dissuading them. There are mailing [jiscmail.ac.uk] lists [jiscmail.ac.uk] a plenty, those conferences I mentioned, a documented API/plugin architecture which already supports a fairly wide market of 3rd party extensions, which could provide another barrier to switching, etc.

So, I would love to see an OSS VLE, because there's surely room for improvement, but I'm not aware of any that's really ready, and even if there is, it faces the usual uphill battle against entrenched investment and long term commitment in terms of extensions, staff training, etc.

variety is good; Spotter, LON-CAPA for science

Different teachers are interested in doing different things. Science teachers don't necessarily have the same needs as foreign language teachers, and even within a particular field, teachers have their own preferences about how they want to do things. You might want to think more in terms of providing a variety of OSS tools, and letting teachers choose. This doesn't have to be instead of proprierary software; it can be in addition to it. Some teachers probably do like the proprietary systems.

For my own needs as a science teacher who doesn't teach online courses, I wrote Spotter [lightandmatter.com], which is open source. Also check out LON-CAPA [lon-capa.org].

Re:Moodle

I just took a Computer Science class that used Moodle. It was mostly great, and more useful than the average college class web page, but I did encounter a few problems:

Grades--you can see your grades any time, but only if all assignments and tests happe