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NO study has shown that students benefit

A good counterexample is software developed at MSU called LON-CAPA, which is used to help math and science students check their answers to homework problems. Here is a list of publications about the system. For an example of a study that shows there is a benefit, try D. A. Kashy, G. Albertelli, E. Kashy and M. Thoennessen, Teaching with ALN Technology: Benefits and Costs, Journal of Engineering Education, 89, 499 (2001).

Another example that I've heard about recently, although on a purely anecdotal basis, is that handheld devices are turning out to be extremely helpful for working with autistic kids. I know someone who works with severely autistic children, many of whom have no language. They have ipads in the classroom, and she says it really helps a lot. For instance, if the kid wants fish sticks for lunch, they have an app where the kid can pop up a picture of fish sticks and show it to the person serving the food. This is way better than having the kid screaming or biting because he wants fish sticks but can't express that desire. I don't know if there is any peer-reviewed research yet on the effectiveness of the technique -- it sounds like it's fairly recent. However, if you google "ipad autism" you'll turn up a ton of material.

So maybe what you meant was that you didn't know of any studies that showed a benefit, or that there is probably no benefit from throwing a bunch of hardware at the kids without doing all the hard work of finding the right software and making sure it's used in an effective way.

That would be a completely different statement.

NO study has shown that students benefit

A good counterexample is software developed at MSU called LON-CAPA, which is used to help math and science students check their answers to homework problems. Here is a list of publications about the system. For an example of a study that shows there is a benefit, try D. A. Kashy, G. Albertelli, E. Kashy and M. Thoennessen, Teaching with ALN Technology: Benefits and Costs, Journal of Engineering Education, 89, 499 (2001).

Another example that I've heard about recently, although on a purely anecdotal basis, is that handheld devices are turning out to be extremely helpful for working with autistic kids. I know someone who works with severely autistic children, many of whom have no language. They have ipads in the classroom, and she says it really helps a lot. For instance, if the kid wants fish sticks for lunch, they have an app where the kid can pop up a picture of fish sticks and show it to the person serving the food. This is way better than having the kid screaming or biting because he wants fish sticks but can't express that desire. I don't know if there is any peer-reviewed research yet on the effectiveness of the technique -- it sounds like it's fairly recent. However, if you google "ipad autism" you'll turn up a ton of material.

So maybe what you meant was that you didn't know of any studies that showed a benefit, or that there is probably no benefit from throwing a bunch of hardware at the kids without doing all the hard work of finding the right software and making sure it's used in an effective way.

That would be a completely different statement.

Why? It's not like there aren't already a lot of highly capable Open Source LMSs out there, some are even written in Java.

Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.

I've been using a system developed at Michigan State University, LON-CAPA http://www.lon-capa.org/, for three years now. The software is open source, runs on linux servers, and it actually allows for free flow of information. I am free to make any of my course content freely available to anyone using LON-CAPA at any institution. Since all servers are interlinked, you simply access others' files on a virtual file system. I find it years ahead of WebCT and Desire2Learn (the system my campus has bought into) for writing homework problems involving equations and calculations. LON-CAPA was designed by engineers and scientists for engineering and science courses. Since they have no advertising budget, the only way to spread the word about LON-CAPA is by word of mouth. If you are a student of a teacher, support OSS, and think that information should be free, I suggest you check it out.

For my own needs as a science teacher who doesn't teach online courses, I wrote Spotter, which is open source. Also check out LON-CAPA.

What is very interesting about this project is that works on a distributive model of content and test development. Ie a instructor for a course can construct a curricular sequence from publicly available content and activities/exercises from sources throughout the network. Activities and content composed by instructors can be made available to others very easily.

What is also to note is that exercises/tests are programmed in perl so that each student gets individualized questions according to a template and a variety of parameters.

A modPerl/MySQL replacement for both blackboard and WebCT is Lon-CAPA. This isn't PHP as you suggested, but it is a GPL alternative to blackboard and WebCT that has more features and is easier to use than both.

Lon-CAPA is also free under the GPL.

It is a GPLed course setup, developed and used by many universities accross the country. It stresses the "nonlinear" flow of a course, although it is easy to create linear "textbook" courses as well.

The entire loncapa is built upon Redhat 6.2 and is designed to scale my simply adding more servers.

Courses can be created within loncapa or they can be set up separetely and imported in. Each component of a course can be an HTML page, a multimedia clip, a Java applet, a problem or assignment. These components are combined into the course.

I seen a few other solutions, which consisted of providing documentation/multimedia in a *linear* course style flow. They, however, were far from a training course. I assume that in a training course, you want to evaluate the students/trainees. Lon-CAPA provides for this. They way that the courses are set up lends itself nicely to Multimedia/any content in small components, which build up a section. Small sections, which build up a course, and small courses that build up a curriculum. Actually, it's abstract, so you can build up whatever you want, from whatever you want.

It's been used at many Universities for a few years and is very mature, despite being in constant development.

It's also GPLed software. It doesn't just rival most commercial software packages, it does much more than *any* commercial software packages. The entire philosophy of Lon-CAPA is different than that of the other packages. Lon-CAPA is based around the student/admin/instructor, whereas other packages are based around the course material. This significant difference provides for a much easier and more intuitive experience.

In the State of New York all of the non-profit orgs have to get approval before they can make any purchases over a certain amount of money. I'm not sure ofthe exact amount, but I've heard that it is an amount that commonly comes up in day-to-day purchases.

I feel confident that 99% percent of the buearacrats don't have any clue what open-source software is and they would have a hard time approving any kind of expense.

There are a couple of examples of non-profit type of groups that develop open-source software. They tend to be university research groups or funded with a grant. lon-capa was one that I could find. lon-capa appears to be funded via the NSF. I'm not sure if they have non-profit status or not.