Open Source LMS, MOODLE, ATutor, Sakai, Canvas, and others

from www.scribd.com/doc/404896/Open-Source-LMS

Moodle is not a one-size-fits-all solution. In some situations you’ll be better off with Sakai, dotLRN (.LRN), Ilias or ATutor. When the likes of NATO is using Ilias and Yale is running Sakai, this is certainly not the one horse race that many service providers would have you believe.

While Moodle probably has greater penetration and visibility in primary and secondary education, it is not the most advanced product for primary and secondary education. That mantle belongs to Sakai.

Small and medium sized business

Ilias, Atutor, Moodle and Sakai share the top spots in this market. All four products scored identically in two areas: assessment engines and tools for content authoring.

There is a choice between Java (Sakai) and PHP (Ilias, ATutor and Moodle) server environments, which may influence organisations looking to handle support and customisation internally

ILIAS Provides testing and assessment tools as well as collaboration tools such as chat and forums, and distribution technologies like RSS and podcasts.

Sakai, aimed at Universities, this project has a clear roadmap and has seem considerable development in the last few years. Backed by the Sakai Foundation which manages relationships with educational and commercial supporters.

competency profiling

Taking competency profiling out of the equation would mean that Sakai wins hands down with a clean sweep of maximum points in all other areas.

This measures skills and certifications against job role definitions to define areas in which an employee requires additional training and those in which the employee is already skilled to the appropriate level.
There really is nothing to choose between Moodle, Sakai and ATutor. They all share joint second place.

Ilias is outperformed by all three other LMSs in collaboration tools and ease of rebranding, but
Ilias gains this top spot due to its support for competency profiling, despite having lower scores overall. This is a really key area in which all the other LMSs reviewed scored zero. This represents a major gap between what the market wants and what the open source LMSs are delivering.

There is so much data held in disparate systems across the public sector that use of web services to link up systems is becoming widespread. Also, individual learning plans are vital for organisations in which the level of skills and expertise varies so widely.

Primary and secondary education

While Moodle probably has greater penetration and visibility in the sector, it is not the most advanced product for primary and secondary education. That mantle belongs to Sakai.

Sakai and Moodle both score identically in all areas except accessibility and integration with external administration systems, where Sakai is clearly ahead.

Atutor and Sakai both share strengths on accessibility

Sakai began life with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Five founding institutions merged elements of their existing home-brew course management systems, the largest contribution coming from University of Michigan followed by Indiana University, MIT, Stanford University and the Open Knowledge Initiative. Big business moved in during 2005 as IBM, Sun and Unisys all came on board. Fast forward to 2007 and there are now over 100 Sakai Partners, each contributing in the region of £5,000 annually to the Sakai Foundation.

One of our aims in writing this white paper was to deconstruct the myth that we keep hearing time and again: “Open source LMS = Moodle”. At Epic, we want to support our customers by offering accurate and timely advice and expertise about the LMS that is best suited to their needs. After all, it’s in Epic’s long term interests that our customers’ learning programmes get off on the right foot. We believe that Moodle is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that in some situations you’ll be better off with Sakai, dotLRN, Ilias or ATutor. When the likes of NATO is using Ilias and Yale is running Sakai, this is certainly not the one horse race that many service providers would have you believe.

thejournal.com/articles/2011/02/01/new-lms-from-instructure-goes-open-source.aspx

As a start, Canvas integrates with Web services such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS. When a teacher changes the date of a quiz, for example, the system automatically sends a text message to students who want notifications sent to their phone, a Facebook message to students who want notifications sent to their social network, or an e-mail message to students who prefer that.

Panola College, a community college in Carthage, TX, began a pilot of Instructure in January after using WebCT for multiple years. WebCT is now owned by Blackboard. “Blackboard is going to eliminate WebCT altogether. At first, I thought we would just make the natural transition to Blackboard, but I found out quickly that that wasn’t what a lot of our faculty wanted to do. So that’s when we began to investigate other potential LMSes,” said Ann Morris, dean of distance education.

Joined by Jason Gilbert, Panola’s education technology coordinator, Morris began evaluating alternatives, and that’s when Canvas came onto their radar. They attended an audio conference about the product in September 2010. “I expected not to like Canvas and was very surprised. They were offering some of the very same tools for students and faculty that Jason and I were wishing for,” she recalled.

Those features include a multitude of options for faculty to communicate with students, its social network integration capabilities, and the SpeedGrader function, which will allow the college’s online speech teachers to request that their online students video themselves using their Webcams and then upload it to Canvas.

Panola began its pilot testing in mid-January with 13 instructors–“far more than I expected,” Morris added. “We thought two, three, four instructors would give us a good analysis. Then we had 13 come forward, close to a third of our faculty that uses an LMS. We were excited about that.”

Although Morris is hesitant to express any opinions about the product–“I don’t want the instructors to feel as though I’m guiding them in one way or another,” she explained–she noted that she’s pleased with how open the company is to taking feedback. “As our teachers who are piloting Canvas request a feature, we pass that to the Canvas engineers who will incorporate it. We’re not just using it. We’re providing them with a lot of valuable feedback and helping them make their LMS better.”

Canvas

Canvas LMS goes open source – Moodle is “kind of kludgy”

http://educhalk.org/blog/2011/02/canvas-lms-goes-open-source-an-appealing-alternative-to-moodle/

This could be the sign of a real competitor for Moodle in the open source LMS market. I’ve reviewed their Canvas LMS and it’s light years ahead of Moodle in virtually every area. It remains to be seen how “open source” they really become…not all open source is equal. But, for anyone out there looking for a viable alternative to Moodle’s tired old 1990′s look, feel, and functionality, you should take a look at Canvas to see what a web 2.0 LMS looks like.

Is this the beginning of the end for Moodle? Don’t know, but Moodle has been in a downward spiral for a few years now and the only thing keeping it afloat is the number of early adopters and there being no easy alternative in the LMS market. SAKAI is there, but isn’t easy to install and configure…it’s more of a nich product among a closed group of partner institutions. If Instructure does this right, then they will overtake Moodle…they have the product…they just need to create the open source community model to make it work. My advice – learn what not to do from Moodle. learn what to do from WordPress – and you’ll do well!

Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source

January 31, 2011, 10:27 pm

By Josh Keller

Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license.

In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges.

Josh Coates, Instructure’s chief executive, promoted the platform’s ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. “I don’t consider what we’ve done at Instructure like rocket science,” Mr. Coates said. “But it feels like it because we’re sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.”

Mr. Coates is a tech-industry veteran who started Mozy, an online file-backup start-up that sold for $76-million in 2007. He said he viewed Blackboard, long the dominant platform, as vulnerable because, he said, its software was hopelessly outdated and its patents had been rejected.

Open Source LMS – 10 Alternatives to Moodle

http://barrysampson.com/2009/04/open-source-lms-10-alternatives-to-moodle/

moodle is often the only option provided in cPanel, used by shared hosting ISP’s

8th April 2009 By Barry

Because there is no licensing cost involved with open source solutions, its easy for organisations to just jump in and set up the first solution that comes along. There is however a cost to installation and support, either financial or time related. Anyone setting up an LMS has a responsibility to research and choose the solution that is right for the learners and the organisation.

As a starting point here are 10 open source alternatives to Moodle. These are deliberately brief descriptions, and I would encourage you to visit these sites and explore each solution in some detail.

Docebo In use in corporate and higher education settings. Offers support for a number of different learning models and is compatible with SCORM 1.2 and 2004. It offers interfaces to external systems such as video conferencing and HR systems.

With the Docebo headquarters in Milan, this LMS is particularly popular in Italy but with about 55% of their installation manual downloads being in English as opposed to Italian, it is clearly proving popular throughout the rest of the world. … their focus, is on expanding what they call the Corporate LMS sector.
– daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2010/01/22/getting-your-own-lms-part-3-docebo/

eFront PHP; The base install is quite minimalist, but this is easily extended with modules available from the site. Commercial versions with additional features are also available. www.efrontlearning.net/

eFront: Greek company Epignosis developed the system of which the Community editon is open source. As it is SCORM 1.2 compatible you can import Articulate content and track scoring.
* You can force users to view content sequentially or specify any prerequisites you like. ie. to see item 1 you must complete item 2 first.
* You can schedule certain courses for certain dates.
* Inbuilt forum and chat functions.
* Certificates are available for downloading if you successfully complete a course.
– daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2009/12/23/getting-your-own-lms-part-2-efront/

Claroline Aimed more at the educational than corporate arena, this system is based around specific pedagogical principles (as is Moodle). Supports SCORM content as well as a built in Wiki and other online content tools. [Claroline is written in PHP.v5.1.6 [ok] and MySQL ]
Claroline was initiated in 2001 by the UCL (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium) and has been developed following teachers’ pedagogical experience and needs. The project was financially supported by the Fondation Louvain.
The Claroline Consortium was born on May 23, 2007
members of the Consortium are :
* Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
* Haute Ecole Léonard de Vinci, Belgium
* Universidade de Vigo, Spain
* Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada
* Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile
* Ecole Centrale de Lyon, France
* Université Blaise Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand, France
* Université de Montpellier 2, France
* Université de Bordeaux 1, France

ATutor Actually an LCMS, ATutor also offers tools for the management of learning. The “A” stands for Accessible and it has excellent support for key accessibility standards as well as support for SCORM, IMS etc.
“Designed for accessibility and adaptability by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto.”
Creating a custom look can be done with a few adjustments to a theme stylesheet, or a new layout can be created by editing theme templates.

ILIAS Provides testing and assessment tools as well as collaboration tools such as chat and forums, and distribution technologies like RSS and podcasts.
ILIAS began at the faculty of business administration, economics and social sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. ILIAS now has a large cooperation and support partner network concentrated around Europe. ILIAS is written in PHP. [overhead drawback: it contains almost 200 megs of code; difficult to maintain, debug]

OLAT A well featured system in its tenth year of development. Recently the winner of the “IMS Learning Impact Leadership Award 2009 for best open source learning platform”.
The development of OLAT started in 1999 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where it is the strategic learning management system and deployed on the main OLAT server. The University of Zurich leads the further development and engages a team of 18 developers. OLAT is written in Java and javascript. – www.olat.org [overhead drawback: it contains over 200 megs of code; difficult to maintain, debug]

Sakai Aimed at Universities, this project has a clear roadmap and has seem considerable development in the last few years. Backed by the Sakai Foundation which manages relationships with educational and commercial supporters.

.LRN Originally developed at MIT, .LRN claims to be the most widely adopted enterprise class open source LMS solution. [.LRN is written in PERL, TCL, ADP, and linux shell scripts, ]

openelms Marketed specifically as a business solution, and claims a diverse customer base that ranges from Merrill Lynch to Queens Park Rangers football club.

Ganesha This LMS developed by Anema, has been around since 2001 and is in use in several large organisations. The site, and the LMS itself, are in French but it can be translated.