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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?

#42

Post by stef25 »

ianbooker wrote: post #19

Is (online) education is an attractive market? Before Covid, the answer was: Meh. Lot of competition, little funding in most countries. And Moodle (or Canvas) is a good enough solution, both also enable kind of third-party marketplaces. We looked at different LMS solutions and some better ones could best be described as "Moodle distributions", centered around a theme and some plugins.

Moodle seems like Joomla. The support forums are also full of posts by what seems like "the least bad IT person" in the education dept wondering how the hell this thing works, posting all kinds of confusing statements and code.

There's so many excellent SAAS platforms ... there should be something better than Moodle.

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

#44

Post by immnn »

Good question and very relative nowadays. You should have a look at ILIAS. It’s been developed by German universities. However, it’s very versatile and pluggable.

As a company we are offering several integrations.

ILIAS is very strong when it comes to collaboration, but it doesn’t offer video conferences out of the box. Actually, I also don’t see ILIAS in that position. For such requirements you should definitely have a look at other solutions like MS Teams, Zoom etc. just because of scalability. Here in Germany mentioned solutions aren’t allowed because of privacy concerns. However, there are open source solutions followed by a system offered by the state for schools and other educational instances.

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

#47

Post by dash2 »

OJFord wrote: post #26

> The state-of-the-art seems to be Moodle or Canvas which are designed for universities - they use archaic UI and features. Let me add 'Blackboard'. What a joke of a piece of software. If I agreed with people who think blackboards are bad and should (have) be(en) replaced with whiteboards, the joke might be 'ha ha it's old and crusty it's even in the name'. I'm a few years out of university so I wouldn't know where t…

Ah, Blackboard. https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-b...

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

#48

Post by em-bee »

endymi0n wrote: post #30

I've been wondering the same and came to this conclusion: - Existing learning management systems are a mirror (and a victim) of the education system itself, as that's where most of the developers come from: Academic, underfunded and people-focused. - Academica leads to overflowing complexity. In the whole system, simplicity is punished and complexity is cherished, so you end up with confusing UX. - Underfunded is pre…

Existing learning management systems are a mirror (and a victim) of the education system itself, as that's where most of the developers come from: Academic, underfunded and people-focused.

this.

part of the problem is that an LMS is used by several different types of people:

    - students
    - teacher
    - parents
    - administrators
    - other staff
everyone has different needs and expectations.

also, the users who use the system the most are not the ones paying for it. so they don't get much of a say.

every school has different priorities.

a good system for you may not be a good system for anyone else.

I'm still up for it, maybe in my next startup :)

i have been looking into doing that for a long time, but i had to shelve the idea. i am still interested in approaching this, but i do not believe that a large project without any users right from the start will be successful.

rather the approach should be to find a school, build a custom system for them and expand from there. it is the only way to build a system that actually has users and has a chance of getting funded (by those users)

without those users you'll build something that noone else will want.

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

#49

Post by mkl »

AIrtemis wrote: post #41

I would really recommend Eduflow here. Have tried several LMS's and it has an intuitive platform that resembles notion. We're experimenting with its peer learning components at the moment.

That doesn't seem to be open source? Their home page [1] has lots of stuff about pricing, sales, requesting quotes, etc., and their GitHub [2] has lots of forks of open source projects but not a main LMS project as far as I could see. It also isn't clear it's an LMS itself, as it has a use case example "Extending your LMS's capabilities", and the pricing page has an "LMS Integration" enterprise feature: "Integration to the Learning Management System (LMS) you're using. We support all major LMS's."

[1] https://www.eduflow.com/

[2] https://github.com/orgs/eduflow/repositories

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

#50

Post by dash2 »

The short version:

* Education is socialized. That is, people don't pay for it, instead the state buys it. At university level, this is slightly less true but the state still provides loans which may never be paid back. Even for the rich, who buy their own education, the sector is still extremely inefficient since the main value added is not from the teachers but from the other students. That is, universities are fundamentally clubs (in the economic sense of the term) rather than businesses.

* As a result, there is no payoff for innovating.

* As a result, there is no innovation worth mentioning. This applies to software, teaching, course design and everything else.

* At some point the existing system may become so bad that individual consumers seek alternatives. Then, there may be money to be made in teaching people. Until then, you are condemning yourself to a precarious existence. Good luck!

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