An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard? 84
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:.LRN (Score:3, Interesting)
As a sysadmin for Blackboard on both a Windows and a Linux platform, I say RUN AWAY from Blackboard. Everytime I restart it I cross my fingers, and keep running th
Moodle? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Moodle? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say the main problem with free alternatives is really stupid project names. Moodle? WTF? People need to realize that the name is even more critical than features or capabilities. Having a bad
Re:Moodle? (Score:3, Informative)
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" returned pages on programming syntax. Now, possibly to the annoyance of those searching for syntax info, almost all the results are for the Postfix mail server.
Apparently geeks make more web pages or Google is biased toward geeks since a single word search on
Rename ... MODLE (Score:2)
I'd also drop the second 'O', so the final name would just be MODLE, which can easily be pronounced like "model," and unlike "Moodle," you don't sound retarded, or lend yourself to cow joke
Re:Rename ... MODLE (Score:1)
I'm glad you didn't name this project.
Heh, wtf kind of name is google (Score:2)
And I was like wtf?!? Google?? No one will ever take these yahoos seriously!
So when I found Moodle in 03, I was less concerned about the name:-).
Re:Moodle? (Score:2)
Funny thing is, if Blackboard was much more complicated than it currently is, they *definitely* wouldn't be able to sell it. You'd be surprised at how many higher education faculty members don't like even moderately complicated technologies.
Re:Moodle? (Score:2)
Actually, Blackboard is about the only LMS/CMS that has a non-silly name. I do agree that it's surprising that it's sold at all - it's such a piece of crap... I *hate* developing in that environment...
Modular Object Oriented Dynamic (Score:2)
Is that worse than Gooooooooooogle?
On the bright side, it's GPL so you can install it and call it anything you want:-).
Re:Moodle? (Score:2)
Re:Moodle? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Moodle? (Score:1)
Sakai (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know, creating an alternative to Blackboard is the primary focus of the project.
Re:Sakai (Score:3, Insightful)
Try Moodle [moodle.org] instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Sakai (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Sakai (Score:2)
Personally, however, I hate Blackboard; it's interface, though learnable, is not nearly as intuitive as an online course management system should be, and for some reason, both professors and TAs have trouble with entering and managing grades through Blackboard. This suggests to me that Blackboard is a poorly w
Re:Sakai (Score:1)
Moodle is proven more robust than Sakai (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Moodle is proven more robust than Sakai (Score:2)
Last month I sat through a presentation of that same comparison [humboldt.edu] you linked to at the local LUG [humlug.org]. It looks like students tended to prefer Moodle slightly over Blackboard. IIRC, HSU [humboldt.edu] (where the comparison was done) seems to want to ditch Blackboard because of high prices and lack of features in the basic version they're using.
Right now, I'm attending the community college down the road from HSU, which uses Blackboard. It's slow and clunky IMHO, and isn't used very much. Also, the two (?!?) pages leadin
Re:Sakai (Score:1)
Re:Sakai (Score:2)
TikiWiki? (Score:3, Interesting)
Beyond that, maybe start with e.g. Horde [horde.org] and work from there?
Damien
word of advice... (Score:4, Informative)
uPortal (Score:2, Informative)
Moodle (Score:1)
We're currently using it, and it's working great. One of it's best points is that it was designed with educational pedagogy in mind, which helps the teaching/learning process.
Re:Moodle (Score:1)
Re:Moodle (Score:3, Informative)
Grades--you can see your grades any time, but only if all assignments and tests happen through Moodle. Our exams and final didn't, and because they were curved in addition, nobody knew where they really stood in the class until it was over.
More grades--a couple of times, Moodle didn't like a perfectly correct answer to a quiz question a
Nav block or xTree (Score:2)
iirc there are a few on sourceforge that arent bad (Score:2)
yes a couple (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:COSE (Score:1)
At least I've never used it, or even heard of it in the two years I've been here, all of our course stuff relies on blackboard.
Well I say all, but most tutors prefer to simply stick up course information/documents on their uni web space..
Re:COSE (Score:1)
It is true that Blackboard is the majority system, but COSE is used at Staffs particularly with Foundation Degrees. Cose is also used at a number of sites around the world, including shortly, the Gates Malaria Partnership.
To say most staff used web sites at Staffs is also wrong, in total there are 43 complete named awards in VLEs plus around 500 modules.
A new version of COSE which is internationalisable will shortly be released and, with UK Gov funding via JISC, work is going
Re:COSE (Score:1)
There are two modules registered for CDS in blackboard for me - SAD and PED (both Dave Thomas owned modules).
Most staff I've encountered prefer to use their own websites to fulfill blackboard like functions. Thinking about it I guess that's because they're more likely to be html literate (although seeing the state of some of the sites you wouldn't think that!)
Ganesha (Score:2, Informative)
If you can read a bit of French, you might try Ganesha:
It's built on PHP and MySQL and released under the GPL. You can use it to serve AICC- and SCORM-compatible courses. It includes built-in webmail, forum, chat and document upload tools.
The interface is translated into several languages, including English. The user community is mostly French-speaking, but there are enough people who also speak English to respond to questions o
OSS = Free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OSS = Free (Score:1)
Re:OSS = Free (Score:2, Insightful)
One may not be "looking to" make modifications, but still want the ability to make them if cause arises.
I'm not "looking to" do any serious repairs on my car, but I would certainly take any sort of vendor lock on repairs as a negative feature when next I buy.
Re:OSS = Free (Score:1)
Re:OSS = Free (Score:2)
It depends whether you mean "free" or "Free".
Personally I can't code for toffee and could contribute very little to FOSS projects. I'd still favour FOSS software over free-but-closed any day. Just because I perosnally can't tinker or improve it doesn't mean I don't appreciate the chance to do so, or the knowledge that others can.
I also find that when something doesn't cost anything you have to ask "Where's the catch?" With FOSS projects you know what the catch is. (You want it, you fix it) You can also
Re:OSS = Free (Score:1)
I have used Blackboard professionally, I have used Moodle extensively. I would choose Moodle over Blackboard without question even if Moodle came at the same license cost. It doesn't, it is Free, gratis and GPL.
Re:OSS = Free (Score:1)
Re:OSS = Free (Score:2)
Of course I suggested this change back to the moodle people but it didn't fit in with their philosophy - how can withholding grades possibly benefit the students? Well, I'm no educational theorist, I just have to do what the lecturer
Re:Get a clue! (Score:2)
Re:Get a clue! (Score:1)
Check out Logicampus (Score:4, Informative)
How does it scale? (Score:2)
Fenix (Score:3, Informative)
HTMLeZ from the University of North Dakota (Score:1, Informative)
Interact (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that great. (Score:1)
That aside, the Pipeline wemail client is _slow_ except at insane hours, updates with every resize, and not very cu
Blackboard is awful, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Moodle is ready (Score:2)
See the Comparisons and Advocacy: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=2784 [moodle.org] forum at Moodle.org (click the login as guest button to read) for discussions of folks who have or are making the switch.
eGrade Plus (Score:1)
In the past year, we've launched eGrade Plus here at Wiley [wiley.com] which is a full course management system which a professor can choose to adopt along with one of our textbooks [wiley.com] for his or her class. It is not Open Source though we do run it on Linux servers and used a lot of open source tools for development. I used WebCT in college a couple years ago for a few of my classes and have worked with other educational products from the
A new one called Digication (Score:2, Informative)
fle3 for zope/python (Score:2)
Is it just software? (Score:2)
Moodle.com (Score:2)
One of the great things about the Moodle model is that you can change your support partner w/o changing your LMS.
With the commercial solutions if you don't like the support (and nobody seems to:-( they offer, you have to change the whole LMS.
Re:Moodle.com (Score:2)
BB as an LMS (Score:1)
My faculty is quote happy with Blackboard. We are lucky we have money to buy the Oracle License to go with it. We have an LVS cluster for Blackboard. We have been using BB for over 5 years. It's a lot easier to learn for users then webct.
Yes you can't do some things, but mostly people are not reaching the boundaries of the system. When this happens frequently, then you need to look at an alternative.
Also keep in mind that BB and WebCT are Uni size systems. Our faculty has 500 people using BB on a daily
variety is good; Spotter, LON-CAPA for science (Score:3, Interesting)
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].
Argument for FOSS (Score:1)
Unless your schoolsystem plans to have EVERY educator use the system regularly and to its full potential, a commercial solution probably won't be the best answer. Sure, all those bells and whistles on the
claroline (Score:1, Informative)
Dokeos (Score:1)
Re:Dokeos (Score:1)
Dokeos (Score:2)
It's a GPL'ed LAMP-based CMS. We've been using it (or its parent Claroline) for the last two years here at the college. It's not feature complete when compared to BB- the biggest misses are a gradebook and an advanced conferencing system- but it does about 90% of what we need it to do. Our most recent survey got a good or excellent vote from 86% of the faculty.
It's very easy to modify and customize. I've got it set up