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Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#141

Post by marcosdumay »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #76
streamofdigits wrote: post #67

The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors. In any case…

>The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors. This is in…

> there is no one to sue of something goes awry

Hum... There's no way to sue any commercial software distributor, it doesn't matter if it's proprietary.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#143

Post by marcosdumay »

geocrasher wrote: post #123
BudaDude wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moodle is good until you realize that the documentation on it is garbage.

Moodle Is Great! It's Open Source! If you need more functionality, just add a plugin. WAIT. HIT THE BRAKES RIGHT THERE. Yes. It's open source. But that isn't helping anything. When you find a plugin that does The Thing You Need, you find that it's for a version of Moodle that's several years old and was written by one guy who hasn't touched it since 2014. There are some plugins that are great and up to date. They are…

The one largest problem with Moodle is its dependency on plugins and the consequent decentralization of core functionality. The core UX itself is shit because it needs to open space for plugins to change it and because it was created as a set of independent plugins itself.

But yeah, if you need more functionality, just write a plugin.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#144

Post by b20000 »

having tried selling a product into education myself (not the college circuit but high school/middle school) i greatly underestimated the difficulty of sales into education which is probably one of the reasons there are not many choices in terms of software made by startups or small teams, open source or not.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#145

Post by indirectlylit »

sails wrote: post #140
indirectlylit wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike most other learning platforms, Kolibri supports users that don't necessarily have fast or consistent internet access. While it can be hosted in the cloud, it is designed to run on a local network so that the experience is fast and responsive, and is specific for the needs in places with limited internet. Content and data can be synced to other locations as-needed. See also https://kolibri.readthedocs.io/

Thanks. If the content is likely to be entirely cloud based, would this then be inappropriate due to the platform being built around local and location syncing?

If you mean there's a server-side component to the content, then no Kolibri would not work.

Kolibri supports a range of offline-friendly, self-contained formats such as videos, exercises, HTML-based apps, PDFs, and e-books. These can be uploaded to the cloud-based Kolibri Studio [1] and then synced to the learning platform. We also maintain a large collection of openly-licensed educational resources [2] freely available for immediate use.

[1] https://kolibri-studio.readthedocs.io/ [2] https://catalog.learningequality.org/

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#146

Post by soniczentropy »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #76
streamofdigits wrote: post #67

The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors. In any case…

>The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors. This is in…

This is the correct answer for sure. I managed an LMS department for years and you nailed it.

I'd also like to add that most education IT departments tend not to have many people capable of building or maintaining something as complex as an LMS. That means you'd need to hire at least a couple new software devs at software dev salaries and software dev benefits to keep them...which ends up costing MORE per year than it costs to shove 99% of the problem off onto Blackboard support and remove a large source of risk while saving money.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#148

Post by ai_ia »

> Anyone running an edtech company here? What do you use? Or do you build everything custom?

We created a LMS from scratch at Primerlabs.(https://primerlabs.io) Though it had different requirements, because we create conversational courses.

If you are starting with video based platform, I recommend not focusing on creating a LMS from scratch and use tools (zoom, google sheet/form) etc. based on your requirement and create small tools to fit as your grow. For community you can use discord or discourse.

Creating an LMS from the get go is time consuming and does little for your business. My 2 cents.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

#150

Post by jrm4 »

Because there are no good LMS, period. The entire concept of a "Learning Management System" is stupid and conclusory, but makes for a good business model that you can sell to unsuspecting administrators.

You just cannot "all-in-one" a system of learning without real modularity, and/or non-exclusivity. -- but the LMS always HAS to do some of this in order to keep its percieved edge; this creates very bad incentives of lock-in, like Canvas' idiotic and horrible "Conversations," which is just email but worse.

Source: I work in one everyday, and something always suffers as the money-maker tries to keep their competitive edge. In my experience the best shot at this is probably Google Classrooms, precisely because they're NOT desperate in this business.

(This is very analogous to how Wordpress became the best CMS precisely because it wasn't trying to be one.)

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