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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/
I don't know the full capabilities of Blackboard but I would look into moodle as an alternative.
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"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I just took a Computer Science class that used Moodle. It was mostly great, and more useful than the average college class web page, but I did encounter a few problems:
Grades--you can see your grades any time, but only if all assignments and tests happen through Moodle. Our exams and final didn't, and because they were curved in addition, nobody knew where they really stood in the class until it was over.
More grades--a couple of times, Moodle didn't like a perfectly correct answer to a quiz question and graded it wrong. The TA was unable to override Moodle's grading, either because she couldn't figure it out, or because it's not possible (the latter, according to her). This made the grade listing even less useful.
Lastly, by the end of the fifteenth week, every time you visited the Moodle, you had a lot of scrolling to do to get to the current assignment. Maybe this is something a better-informed designer could have overcome.
I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.