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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.
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.
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.
Not wholly Open Source, but have a look at COSE from Staffordshire University. They plan a FOSS release in the future.
Éibhear
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.
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.