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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?

#151

Post by streamofdigits »

soniczentropy wrote: post #146
xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

this does not address the OSS / proprietary choice though. e.g., there are companies providing support for Moodle. it is service that must be paid somehow, whether through internal staff, external partners or a proprietary software vendor as an additional offering.

The mystery is why they wouldn't amortize the development costs of the platform across the vast number of institutions, creating an ecosystem where smaller edtechs could provide niche customizations via plugins etc.

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

#152

Post by vyrotek »

Having worked in this industry for a number of years I feel the core issue is that an LMS is trying to organize and standardize an industry that is fundamentally disorganized.

There is an appearance of structure to content, courses, and curriculum but it's constantly evolving and changing. Often mid-class! The reality is the Eng 101 class you took last year is not the same someone will take this year.

Every school/class/teacher has exceptions to the way they run and evaluate things. So the software always evolves into more of a CMS+CRM with a million checkboxes and settings.

Source: I'm developing an LMS + remote teacher management platform at a startup right now.

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

#153

Post by hermes8329 »

Open source or not they pretty much all such. and I generally don't blame users but In this case it is flat out the users/admins

They are going to contort straight forward concepts into crazy mangled mutant plans

No matter the quality of the product,. The documentation available, the training, the handholding is all for nothing really quickly

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

#154

Post by ejss »

It sounds like Appsembler's Tahoe product is what you're looking for, come checkout our free trail!: https://www.appsembler.com/tahoe/ FYI - I'm a software engineer and I work on the Tahoe/Open edX team.

Tahoe is a user-friendly platform that makes it really easy to spin up an open edX LMS. It aims to alleviate a lot of the issues that are mentioned on this thread about Open edX. Tahoe comes with out of the box tools to customize your LMS and provides great user support (docs/highly responsive customer success team).

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

#155

Post by pxc »

It's been a little while since I used it, but I remember Canvas having a relatively nice UI compared to Blackboard, back when I did. Has it fallen behind? What strikes you as archaic in its design? What's nice about Blackboard these days?

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

#156

Post by outsidetheparty »

I worked in this space for a loooooong time (mostly in higher ed; I have less knowledge about the corporate or k-12 segments.)

The short answer is: It's surprisingly complex to build a good LMS at all; it verges on impossible to build a good generic LMS that covers all or even many use cases.

Everyone teaches differently; everyone has their own particular method for grading; everyone has their own opinions about how much or how little classroom communication should be handled through the LMS vs in person; everyone has their own preexisting tools and data they need to integrate with. All of those differences conflict with one another to some extent; class sizes differ, class durations differ, etc etc etc. Supporting all of these would guarantee an overcomplicated and difficult to use interface.

This isn't the sort of thing that open source tends to do well. The best open-source work is "scratch your own itch" kind of stuff; this pattern in LMS development has historically been that they start out that way, as a home-rolled solution built by a tech-savvy instructor, then accrete layers of contradictory features in pursuit of a larger audience, and either become too unwieldy to use in their own right or else get purchased by one of the already-bloated large competitors.

(I find it personally hilarious that you cite Canvas as the "archaic UI and features" state of the art: Canvas found its original success as the clean, modern alternative to BlackBoard, which at the time was the bloated-to-the-point-of-unusability standard tool. The cycle continues.)

There are also a lot of regulatory hurdles around accessibility, privacy, and pedagogical standards -- particularly in K-12 ed -- that, while very necessary and useful, take a lot of work and knowledge to accomplish, and serve as a barrier to entry to new products in the space.

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

#157

Post by sireat »

I teach 15-30 sized courses to adults but I also teach at a university.

My solution - I installed Moodle on a cheap Hetzner VPS.

Added Let's encrypt for SSL and it seems to work pretty well for 100ish students.

I looked at alternatives but there really wasn't anything better that is open source.

The critical factor - all the universities that I've taught at and also know of at use Moodle.

Thus preserving the lessons, quizzes, exams, pages, etc. was quite important.

I was able to migrate my courses from older Moodle versions(3.7) at university to my own latest version (3.11) with no issues.

One thing I have not done yet is set up mail.

How well does e-mail from Hetzner IPs get through to gmail (what most students use)?

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

#158

Post by cycomanic »

dash2 wrote: post #130
cycomanic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find statements like this incredibly arrogant. As if education could be revolutionised by some webapp. Moreover it's also provably false. Education is big business in most countries and a significant portion of gdp (and often not "socialise" either, universities, private schools, private certificate/education providers etc.). Despite of that nobody managed to "disrupt" education yet, because education is difficult…

What's arrogant is assuming that we are educating our kids as best as we can already. For anyone working in the sector, that's not just arrogant, it's absurd. Most developed countries have state-run primary and secondary education systems, and most of them also have highly or entirely state-funded tertiary education. This is a statement of the obvious, I think. I also mentioned reasons why private providers often had…

I never said that we already are educating our kids as best as we can, so that's a strawman. I actually agree that there's still a lot we don't know about learning. However, I don't believe we we will see a revolution of how we learn, and that revolution will certainly not come from businesses or startups. It requires way too much long term investment with uncertain outcomes.

Regarding LMS, so you know one proprietary system (which is admitably aweful) and based on that you make general judgements of the two open source alternatives?

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

#159

Post by icedata »

I deployed the open-source version of Canvas for use at a summer course at a university in Beijing (it was done remotely). Just getting it installed was the hardest part. We hosted on Alibaba in Hong Kong (no web site license required there). Support for the open-source version comes via IRC and was actually quite good. Show-stopper was a rapidly growing log file (due to a persistent error I couldn't figure out). Eventually had to create a cron job to regularly truncate it. Apart from that it was pretty solid. The other tricky thing was getting outbound email to work (not very well documented). Persistence pays.

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

#160

Post by dash2 »

cycomanic wrote: post #158
dash2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's arrogant is assuming that we are educating our kids as best as we can already. For anyone working in the sector, that's not just arrogant, it's absurd. Most developed countries have state-run primary and secondary education systems, and most of them also have highly or entirely state-funded tertiary education. This is a statement of the obvious, I think. I also mentioned reasons why private providers often had…

I never said that we already are educating our kids as best as we can, so that's a strawman. I actually agree that there's still a lot we don't know about learning. However, I don't believe we we will see a revolution of how we learn, and that revolution will certainly not come from businesses or startups. It requires way too much long term investment with uncertain outcomes. Regarding LMS, so you know one proprietar…

Right, we agree that (a) there's not enough innovation in education and (b) under the current structures, business won't provide it. The only thing I add is a specific explanation for (b): state control, and sluggish private organizations at the top, provide little incentive to innovate.

The OP suggested that LMS were not good. I provided a reason why that might be so, which fits my experience. I can confirm that the one LMS I know is terrible.

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