[deleted]
Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
71–80 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#72I wrote an open source scorn sequencing engine which is really at the center of an LMS and my co-worker wrote a really nice looking content editor. But we were working as government contractors in the ADL office and it got squashed because there was legal concern that the government would be seen as competing with private industry.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#73Because there are no good LMSes. It doesn’t matter if it’s open or not. The concept is broken. The platforms people actually like learning with aren’t LMSes.
Kind of agree. I learn all the time, through writing posts, using an mooc platform, coding sites, I search in scholarly search engines, read books.
There is not one "learning" platform that covers all these cases, let alone cover well. The activities and the learning modes are too diverse, I would not trust any single entity to cover all of them.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#74Moodle has adoption by a lot of companies for integration. Having the text book companies have plug-ins that allow battery quizzes and such.
I will agree with others that Blackboard has made it very difficult for entry.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#75https://www.odoo.com/app/elearning
Not exactly a LMS but the open source ERP system Odoo offers a lot you need to sell and provide courses. You can also do live trainings using the Jitsi integration.
Odoo is solid web-software built with Python (and HTML, CSS, JS of course). It's quite easy to extend.
There's a demo at https://demo.odoo.com
(Disclaimer: I'm an official Odoo partner)
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#76The 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 interesting. I had the exact same experience working in a major bank. Corporate would usually rather buy anything than "invest" in open source.
Partly it's a question of "support" (getting RHEL instead of CentOS) even though in practice support is often rather poor and distant. More frustrating is when we buy what are clearly simple reskins of OSS with terrible support from eg Oracle. You get all the disadvantages of using OSS (sometimes poor documentation, too many configuration options etc) while also not having code access or control over the platform.
I've come to the conclusion that corporate is sketched out by OSS because there is no one to sue of something goes awry, and that they just don't trust in-house expertise over basically any vendors. To be honest, they are not entirely wrong about the second one: this kind of corporate culture makes good engineers leave.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#77Not open source, but have you checked Google Classrooms ?
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#78What’s your issue with Moodle?
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#79I'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…
I’ve worked in academia as a SDE or Product Manager for 3 different universities ( Columbia, MIT, and an online school ). From my experience the LMS is always a COTs product with very little customization by IT. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it ( from the college side at least ).
The real need is not the LMS but rather the SIS ( student information system ). The available LMS’ are adequate but none of the Student Information Systems are flexible enough to suit the need of most large universities.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#80Agree with this sentiment having used Moodle and Canvas with school edtech companies (not what they are designed for), and they are really frustrating.
The UX for students is just, sadly, terrible - "old" feeling and difficult to navigate. The UX for learning/content designers is just as bad - a nightmare to create effective content, with poorly considered UI features and constraints.
Hoping to find some great alternatives in the comments.