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An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?
mandrake*rpgdx asks: "The college I work for is looking into creating an all in one online system for teachers and students to be able to take tests, give online courses and do other daily tasks. They are currently looking into the Blackboard system. Is there an FOSS alternative that I could suggest using at their next meeting?"
http://dotlrn.org/
Slow news day, huh?
FP?
I don't know the full capabilities of Blackboard but I would look into moodle as an alternative.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
As far as I know, creating an alternative to Blackboard is the primary focus of the project.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
TikiWiki has added many things over the years that could help with this.
Beyond that, maybe start with e.g. Horde and work from there?
Damien
if you're going before a school committee they most likely have their decision made already. if you want to seriously suggest an OSS alternative it may be a good idea to set up a test server, install it, play with it, learn the capabilities of the OSS programs, and be able to answer any questions they may throw at you.
...and that's all there is to it.
Its free to any accreted institution, JES you can go there and fill out a request for the software.
It's already in use by several Unis so it might be just what you are looking for. It's very customizable and you can even develop your own plugins.
We're currently using it, and it's working great. One of it's best points is that it was designed with educational pedagogy in mind, which helps the teaching/learning process.
I was looking for a similar system a while back and I remember finding a few decent ones on sourceforge and freshmeat and those types of sites.
Try moodle http://moodle.org/ about which i hear good things or possibly boddington http://bodington.org/
Sakai http://www.sakaiproject.org/ has come up on my radar recently and looks like it will certainly be the one for the future though i've no idea if it is good enough now.
For heavens sake try your hardest to avoid blackboard and webCT
They are expensive, crash all the time into non recoverable states, severly limit how you can deliver courses. Overall blackboard is the worst most expensive web software packages i have seen in a 5 year web application deployment career, i haven't seen webCT but everyone i talk to says if anything it is worse than blackboard. Having no VLE is almost better than having either of those 2.
Tips for educating yourself google for VLE (Virtual learning environment) MLE (managed learning environment) if your not up on the terminology.
For pure open source, check moodle and sakai (sp?). For something that isn't F/OSS but is very customizable, check out Angel.
Personally, I never liked Blackboard. I learned WebCT back in its infancy (v 1.1, 1.something beta for Win32) after struggling with TopClass for a few months. We were up and running with 12 completely online classes (english, library science, biology, etc) in just 2 weeks using WebCT.
Also, I've been playing with Desire2Learn for a few months - they may be worthwhile in a few years, but not now.
Check with the powers-that-be regarding license costs, server costs (our new webct servers are gonna be about $22k each next fall), whos going to admin them, if publisher prepared courses are desireable (usually are by instructors, but usually include so much as to be overwhelming and therefore nearly useless), etc. Also consider that many of the big players (webct and bb included) can host courses for you on their servers, etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
ANYTHING that can replace that POS is welcome. It doesnt even function correctly under firefox, then again it never worked right in IE either so go figure. Its just shitty software all around.
Not wholly Open Source, but have a look at COSE from Staffordshire University. They plan a FOSS release in the future.
Éibhear
If you can read a bit of French, you might try Ganesha:
It's built on PHP and MySQL and released under the GPL. You can use it to serve AICC- and SCORM-compatible courses. It includes built-in webmail, forum, chat and document upload tools.
The interface is translated into several languages, including English. The user community is mostly French-speaking, but there are enough people who also speak English to respond to questions on the forums.
Ned Flanders, I mock your value system. You also appear foolish to the eyes of others.
I like how everyone who asks questions here is always like: "Can i get an open source solution to X?" When what they really mean is "Can I get a free solution to X?". They are almost never looking to contribute to or modify the project....which is fine, but lets say i knew of a free alternative to blackboard that wasn't open sourced...you're probably still interested right? Just be up front and say you want free.
Why oh why? Chances are if your staff is used to Blackboard there is no reason to switch and there is also the high likelihood that your management has never even considered an alternative for many reasons and probably has their mind made up. Anything you offer them is going to have to support blackboard modules or it will be a no brainer. Also blackboard is open source in that it is all written in Perl. If you really felt a need to modify the code it is all there in plaintext. Do some freaking homework the next time before you post to slashdot "I want an open source replacement for some essential tool because, well, open source is better." Is it?
Also keep in mind that many book publishers and test software companies create modules exclusively for Blackboard. Why on earth you would want to move away from Blackboard is beyond me considering the headache that any alternative system is going to cause your teachers. How would you feel if you were a teacher and all those tests you were going to use with Blackboard no longer were an option with the new system. And those test creators don't really work for you anymore. Blackboard support is a big deal now with college texts and it is easy to see why given the ease that teachers can deploy tests and get automatic results. My girlfriend is a college instructor and she uses blackboard quite a bit with test generators. She would be extremeley unhappy if she had to start writing test questions as she has little time to deal with even preparing for her classes.
I would just like to say this has got to be the worst idea I've heard in a while and while it is good to try and promote open sores (its a joke people!) software, this isn't something you can just replace and expect the same level of functionality from another product. Think of it this way, you have a bunch of engineers that get drafts in Autocad, how the hell would they feel if suddenly the idiotic management decided that they should be using GnuCAD which didn't support any autocad documents, because they decided that open source is "better." I'm sure it would make their lives so much better right?
I would just love to see your planning meeting.
Zealot: We should use this open source package, it won't cost us anything and we can stop licensing blackboard.
PHB: Does it support blackboard modules?
Zealot: Well, no.
PHB: What benefits does it offer over blackboard?
Zealot: Uh, uh, its free and open source!
PHB: I could care less. Next.
Do yourself a favor and research this before you even think about proposing it.
zosxavius photography
Last time I had to research this I found logicampus to be the best one out there.
My university develops and uses it's own open source system, Fenix. It's actually quite cool, and handles much much more than that, including course applications, classes management, timetables, exams and workgroups management, etc. I'm just not sure if it's fully available in english. At least the site seems to be.
The University of North Dakota has a nice system that they use with their aviation classes that they developed. it can be found at learn.aero.und.edu and I believe a demo is also available
One of the most flexible packages I ever saw is Interact. I have tried some, but all of them seem too restricted to the model designed by the developer. So, for example, WebCT (whish I used some years ago) you have a place to put material, a place to do quizzes, but no way to make more "complex" arrangements of the capabilities. Interact, for example, operates using a "component" model. You have a number of components to choose from and you can group them in any way you like inside "Folders". Currently available components are: forum, group, dropbox, sharing, chat, journal, gradebook, quiz, folder, file, weblink, note, page, calendar, KnowledgeBase and NoticeBoard. Interact is aimed at being a complete school support system, as such, it has a unique student and teacher login for all the content, and each subject has its own "site". So teachers of a subject have administration priviledges on this subject's site, and students have access to all sites of the subjects they are currently taking. A neat feature is that each component has a unique ID, and it can be "shared" among different sites. So I can have two disciplines to share the same messages of a forum, for example. Components can be copied, as to use older subject's sites on a new subject too. Interact's site is http://cce-interact.sourceforge.net/ where you can also find a demo to play with.
Stevens Institute of Technology joined BBone (Blackboard One) a couple of years ago. It ties a lot things together: the best of which are laundry, off-campus businesses which accept "Duckbills" and Pipeline 'groups'. However, when being pitched the system (I was on the committee), I found out later the IT dept/school had _already_committed_ to the system! Made my input and time seem wasted.
That aside, the Pipeline wemail client is _slow_ except at insane hours, updates with every resize, and not very customizable. Pine was better (TtSSh access was terminated), even with the lengthy attachment process. While administration of the groups is sensible, it is in school Administrator hands, not student hands, which has been a source of friction in a few cases.
However, it is very firmly embedded in academia, and I suspect you'll have a hard time dissuading them. There are mailing lists a plenty, those conferences I mentioned, a documented API/plugin architecture which already supports a fairly wide market of 3rd party extensions, which could provide another barrier to switching, etc.
So, I would love to see an OSS VLE, because there's surely room for improvement, but I'm not aware of any that's really ready, and even if there is, it faces the usual uphill battle against entrenched investment and long term commitment in terms of extensions, staff training, etc.
Full Disclosure: I work at Wiley and have done work on eGrade Plus, so I am biased.
In the past year, we've launched eGrade Plus here at Wiley which is a full course management system which a professor can choose to adopt along with one of our textbooks for his or her class. It is not Open Source though we do run it on Linux servers and used a lot of open source tools for development. I used WebCT in college a couple years ago for a few of my classes and have worked with other educational products from the back end since then, but eGrade Plus is at least a generation ahead of most of these (though I too am also very interested in Sakai and have actually been messing around with it recently on a development server).
eGrade Plus is entirely web-based and runs on our servers, but the customers are assigned to domains over which they have a lot of control. We provide a large library of question banks and default assignments for each textbook, but the professor is free to make new questions, alter or create new assignments, and generally to customize the course as much as is desired.
As we make more courses to go with more of our titles, the feature set has been expanding. For our Calculus and Physics titles, we've integrated Maple into the backend to support complex symbolic notation for calculating and entering answers by whatever mathematical method the student uses to arrive at them. There's lots of pretty cool stuff we're experimenting with here based on our own ideas and feedback from our customers, most of which has been very positive.
As I mentioned before, it is not open source. Furthermore, it is only offered for use with our textbooks. Having said that, it is very very tightly integrated with our textbooks -- each registered student has access to a full electronic version of the textbook (as well as many eGP-only supplements) which is cross-referenced with all the other assignments, questionbanks, concept demos and other supplements through their domain.
While eGrade Plus does come with the textbook we also allow and encourage students who don't like to keep their textbooks after the semester is over to purchase a registration code for eGrade Plus only instead of buying a hard copy of the book. You will have semester-long access to the electronic version of the full text for considerably less than the cost of the hard copy and with some extra features to boot.
Finally, eGrade Plus can be integrated with Blackboard and WebCT if that's what your college ends up adopting in the end (just thought that was worth a mention). If you're interested in reading even more, go here.
Anyway, good luck finding the right solution, I'm very interested in some of the other links I've seen posted here too. Sorry if I sounded too much like a not-too-slick marketing droid -- sales pitches aren't really my department, I'm just a code monkey interested in this stuff only partially because it's my job.
I work for a small college (~3000 students) and used to use a software called "campus cruiser". It was horrible - the funny thing is that there was NOT a single class that actually ended up using it. So last year, we evaluated blackboard, webct, and some of the OSS mentioned above. But at the end, we found a great little company in Rhode Island called Digication (http://www.digication.com/) that has the best LMS. After seeing Blackboard and WebCT's sales pitch at our school, we realize that they are VERY expensive to start with, and come with a LOT of maintenance issues and fees. Then we looked at some OSS alternatives, and found that they would be OK if we didn't have to invest in quite a bit of money customizing the software, let alone dealing with finding the right people to administrate and maintain server. We would basically have to hire at least one full-time employee, and 2 part-time students ~$70k/yr. So when we found Digication, we realize that they would do everything (including support, hosting, backup, maintenance) for $35k/yr. We started using Digication last fall, and we already have over 50% adoption rate. According to http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=791, "even in the most advanced institutions only about 50 percent of faculty members are on board with the technology". The other amazing thing is that we had a REALLY low support ticket rate. Since September 2004 (9 months), there has only been 42 tickets generated. That's ~5 support tickets/month, this also shows that the product is rock solid. From what I can understand, Digication runs on Red Hat, uses apache, php, and one of the opensource DB (I think either MySQL or Postgres). Also, make sure you look out for ease of use, UI design, cos they can change your faculty adoption rate greatly!
I love OSS, but we found that in this case it's not necessarily the cheapest route.
Fle3 is also a fairly mature and nice-looking solution. You deal with object databases instead of sql, which is a little harder to maintain and host though. But this product has been around for a long time and has some cool features
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I notice that Blackboard is offered both as a software product and a hosted solution. Which is your school considering? If they plan to just buy the software and host it themselves, then you only need to convince them that there's a better OSS product. But if they're looking for a hosted solution, you have to offer not just an alternate software package but an ASP that can host it.
My faculty is quote happy with Blackboard. We are lucky we have money to buy the Oracle License to go with it. We have an LVS cluster for Blackboard. We have been using BB for over 5 years. It's a lot easier to learn for users then webct.
Yes you can't do some things, but mostly people are not reaching the boundaries of the system. When this happens frequently, then you need to look at an alternative.
Also keep in mind that BB and WebCT are Uni size systems. Our faculty has 500 people using BB on a daily basis as lecturers, 11000 students...student say it's great, easy to find stuff. Why? Because it's always at the same spot, where with WebCT lectureres can put the menu's all over the place and make their site personal. Student generally don't give a toss, they just want their lecturer notes and other info.
Could we move to another system. Yes, but it takes a lot out of an organization to move...try moving from Word to OpenOffice...most of the people are use to how a menu look in word...when it looks different...they are lost (yes they should read the menu...but they don't)
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.
Find free books.
My university used to have blackboard, but they've recently switched to the open-source dokeos. Works perfectly!
One of the valid arguments for F/OSS software of this type which I often hear from my professors is the high cost of commecrcial systems (in our uni's case, WebCT) based on the fact that not all professors choose to utilize the system or the fact that not all class types are suited to this sort of system.
Unless your schoolsystem plans to have EVERY educator use the system regularly and to its full potential, a commercial solution probably won't be the best answer. Sure, all those bells and whistles on the "big boys" sound great, but chances are that your teachers aren't going to want to learn a complicated system, or regularly check that they've added all the new assignments, etc. Just some food for thought.
Jaron _ at _ ElectricInkPen.com Penning the Web Electric
I'd also drop the second 'O', so the final name would just be MODLE, which can easily be pronounced like "model," and unlike "Moodle," you don't sound retarded, or lend yourself to cow jokes at the water cooler. (It also looks vaguely like some French world, which might appeal to intellectuals in higher education.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We use http://www.claroline.net/ at our university. It's php/mysql based, and oss all the way.
It's being used at New Zealand Poly with >40,000 users on a 4 unit cluster, for instance.
Sakai largest installation is uMich with 27,000 students (reportedly on 27 servers) Sakai's release notes call for a new server for every 2000 students.
Moodle has a gradebook, a quiz system, and many other tools that haven't been written yet in Sakai.
Moodle is being used at more than 4000 registered sites world wide, including a number of 10,000-20,000+ student systems.
And Moodle is built with the same technology that Yahoo chose as the best for a (really) large site: PHP.
You can check out Sakai at collab.sakaiproject.org, join up and try the discussion tool out.
ALso see a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm --note this is Moodle 1.3 vs. BB 6, Moodle 1.5 is due out in a few weeks with RSS, a wiki, a new gradebook, and extensive performance tuning by the NZVLE project.
It has equivalent features, it scales, and students like it: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
See the Comparisons and Advocacy: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=2784 forum at Moodle.org (click the login as guest button to read) for discussions of folks who have or are making the switch.
Learning Evironment.
Is that worse than Gooooooooooogle?
On the bright side, it's GPL so you can install it and call it anything you want:-).
what is the largest installation?
offers hosting for Moodle.
One of the great things about the Moodle model is that you can change your support partner w/o changing your LMS.
With the commercial solutions if you don't like the support (and nobody seems to:-( they offer, you have to change the whole LMS.
ask your admin to install the Nav block or the xTree block, these let you navigate a big Moodle course from a sideblock. Tell them to ask about it on Moodle.org if they have questions.
Sakai assumes you are a java shop. It's got some good schools behind it, but it's not there yet.
moodle assumes you have PHP expertise. The roadmap is great and progress is fast. It seems well-suited for small to mid-sized institutions.
TikiWiki assumes PHP and knowledge of their templating system. It works great on a class level. But I'm not sure at an institutional level.
I've team-taught a course using tikiwiki and my institution is migrating from Blackboard to moodle. We looked at Sakai too.
I remember was it back in 96? 97? Anyway, when I first stumbled on this wierd search site, something like http://www.stanford.edu/~lporsomething/google.
And I was like wtf?!? Google?? No one will ever take these yahoos seriously!
So when I found Moodle in 03, I was less concerned about the name:-).
http://www.dokeos.com/
It's a GPL'ed LAMP-based CMS. We've been using it (or its parent Claroline) for the last two years here at the college. It's not feature complete when compared to BB- the biggest misses are a gradebook and an advanced conferencing system- but it does about 90% of what we need it to do. Our most recent survey got a good or excellent vote from 86% of the faculty.
It's very easy to modify and customize. I've got it set up to suck course and enrollment info from our (nonstandard) student information system, we have single sign-on through our campus uPortal, automatic access to files in our eReserve system, etc. The folks at Dokeos are pretty good about taking feedback and code (I've given a lot of the former and a bit of the latter), although once in a while a bug will slip for a bit.
I've got a BB salesdroid showing up on campus soon to try and sell us on an "upgrade". Between Dokeos, Sakai and Moodle I can't see why we'd ever need to consider a commercial product- the features BB has that are better than these groups aren't going to be used here anyway.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"