Learning Management Systems—What is your experience???

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Permalink Reply by S. Penderel on February 20, 2009 at 10:53am

"reasons for institutions to rather buy a commercial system than using one of the freely available ones? "

One main reason... Product Support. If an institution uses open Source, while debugging is a feature of the Open Source community, the institution would still have to cover the hosting, management, and training. By paying for the service, they will guarantee they recieve the service... software, support, training, etc.

"Is it the quality of the product, user friendliness, administrative issues, political issues?"

Regardless... a LMS system is just that, a Management system. Little learning/education occurs within the confines of any LMS, therefore these issues are generally a moot point, and not in the minds of the decision makers.

"Do Open Source systems lack a sufficient support system?"

Generally yes.

Remainder of product research questions...

"What do you like/dislike about the software?"

they are all management systems. When they start trying to incorporate too much (forums, chat, etc.), like Blackboard, they become both mediocre management systems and very bad learning systems. It is best to do the management aspect exceptional then to try to expand to issues that the company does not understand and the software will never be able to accomodate.

"What could be improved?"

The management of the systems (speaking of Blackboard & Moodle here). The system is cumbersome for instructors and students.

Last 2 questions were already answered... Cost, Support, and I would rarely recommend a system with good reviews, rather as a necessary evil.

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on February 21, 2009 at 4:23pm

There is a middle option here that is being excluded. Many open source software solutions come with support options. Moodle, for example, has Moodle partners that provide hosting, management, and training. Beyond that customization is more likely to be available with open code.

I cannot speak to the quality of the services of these partners, but there are many options.

I think there is a bit of a political bias against FOSS software. It is not delivered through the traditional corporate channels. They aren't major sponsors at edtech conferences. Even on sites like this, open source solutions get little attention compared to proprietary ones.

I haven't worked with Blackboard, but I have worked with Moodle (although not within the current academic year). Ultimately, there is no wiki like a dedicated wiki, no blog like a dedicated blog, and so on. LMS are like swiss army knives. They try to be panaceas, but there is no such thing.

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Permalink Reply by Geoff St. Pierre on February 20, 2009 at 5:59pm

We use: Manhattan Virtual Classroom (MVC) it is an open source virtual classroom. It is used by schools and Universities throughout the world.

I am the administrator of the MVC install at our school. I create courses and occasionally deal with some requests. But, mostly the software is very intuitive and teachers figure it out; in fact they do things with it that I would never think of. It has a grades module and many others.

I love it and would highly recommend it. I subscribe to the mailing list; this list is the support for the software. I have both gotten and given help on the list. For most issues I have seen a turnaround of 1 - 2 days. But, perhaps of more value is the fact that the number of requests in minimal. Once you install it; it pretty much runs itself.

There is the issue of bandwidth for a local install, but most Universities have bandwidth, and secondary schools are getting there.

I have installed/used:
• Moodle
• Drupal

Other Open Source include:
• Joomla



Another support consideration is MVC does not require a database such as MySQL which the others do.

cout "Geoff\n";
JS Wiki
JS Blog

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