Moodle is very configurable, took me 40 minutes to create a basic theme so that it sort of followed my company’s style guide.
I also found it a bit complex at first. But after an hour or so it started to make sense.
Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#82The thing about edtech is its B2B nature with a mostly public sector that drives it.
Its hard to make a neat product because you have to accommodate the whims of as many institutions as possible.
You might have to bite the bullet with moodle. Its a learning curve but you can eventually beat it into submission to do what you want.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#83Oh gosh. I could write a whole book on this topic… “SCORM” gives me PTSD, and I’m only barely exaggerating.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#84Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#85Moodle is very configurable, took me 40 minutes to create a basic theme so that it sort of followed my company’s style guide. I also found it a bit complex at first. But after an hour or so it started to make sense.
Just don’t try to hack on its internals or extend it. At least back when I was tasked with doing so.
I was well versed in PHP, but my gosh was that idiosyncratic even then…
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#86The 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…
Maybe its just a phase towards maturity. Functioning / reliable OSS support models are important. "Suing" is just a metaphor for needing reliable partners: running a banking institution or an educational institution or a local government is not a hobby.
But the outsourcing to proprietary vendors mentality might be a far bigger risk. If all you are doing is processing information those vendors will eventually eat your lunch and you will have financed them every step of the way.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#87At Learning Equality we build and maintain Kolibri. It's an open-source, offline-first, self-hosted learning platform. https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri/
How does it compare to Moodle/Canvas in terms of intended use?
I have a contact who is looking for an LMS for teacher education, and kolibri looks probably appropriate.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#88What's an LMS? (I do understand that my asking this question almost certainly means I can't answer your question.)
I don’t know why but it always gets on my nerves when people decide to address a multinational forum with people from every corner of the world and ask for their time and attention, but at the same time decide to save 2 seconds of their own time to avoid typing out “Learning Management System (LMS)”. We all are from different backgrounds and industries and same acronyms can mean different things. I worked in finance,…
I have the same issue with numerous TLAs, most frequently around here: "NLP".
My usual thought sequence is "'Neuro-Linguistic Programming'? Uhhh, no... it's not that, not in this space. 'Near Letter Perfect'? Hmmm... don't think so. 'New Lunar Passage'? Has Elon been smoking that stuff again?..."
Eventually I figure it out, but for some weird reason my brain doesn't really want to hang a hook into "Non-Linear Processing"
;)
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#89I work on a team where we build around and run Open edX. It's incredibly complicated to run because it's not built as an open source product. It's just that edX open sources their software after the fact, so they're not investing in making it easy for anyone to run, of to contribute features. On the team I'm a part of, our strategy is to build open source tools around Open edX, using it as a site builder that stitche…
> incredibly complicated to run because it's not built as an open source product
Would you suggest it as an option to a team with limited devops budget?
The documentation seems reasonable comprehensive. Do you have a brief summary of issues?
https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-installing-configuri...
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?
#90https://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)
Hello!
1. Can you tell me more about the scalability of Odoo LMS for 100-1000 simultan users. What server resources is needed?
2. In the context of using the Odoo LMS, it is a good idea to have the ERP and LMS sharing same web server resouces? In production you use the LMS as a separate Odoo instance, but sharing same database as the main ERP?
Thank you in advance!