I want to start a teaching business. I'm struggling to find good open-source software on which I can start building my platform. The state-of-the-art seems to be Moodle or Canvas which are designed for universities - they use archaic UI and features.
Is there something where I can host an online course, also have live classes and perhaps add on features like a community for students, assignments, etc? The only options I am seeing are things like Kajabi and Teachable which are very restrictive in their feature set, and not customizable.
Anyone running an edtech company here? What do you use? Or do you build everything custom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGEL_Learning
https://www.zdnet.com/article/blackboard-wins-e-learning-pat...
They even sued the government to prevent reexamination of their patents.
https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/12/01/da...
As an open source author who was once interested in producing an LMS, this was a major concern that forced me to explore other fields.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6988138B1/en
In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap. An education platform is not a CMS and its not a social media platform. I think especially now with the pandemic experience it has become very clear how rich, complicated and demanding the educational process actually is. The "archaic UI and features" comment hints maybe at too narrow and technical view. It may be a very relevant aspect (eg if young students puke at the UX it is not of much help). But from an education perspective what matters are not smooth appearances and gimmicks but "educational outcomes".
If you dive into the Dougiamas/Moodle team's thinking you'd see what permeates the design/architecture is to be able to translate the huge body of educator experience and infuse it into software. Somehow we need to move to the next chapter of the book they started writing.
This is interesting. I had the exact same experience working in a major bank. Corporate would usually rather buy anything than "invest" in open source.
Partly it's a question of "support" (getting RHEL instead of CentOS) even though in practice support is often rather poor and distant. More frustrating is when we buy what are clearly simple reskins of OSS with terrible support from eg Oracle. You get all the disadvantages of using OSS (sometimes poor documentation, too many configuration options etc) while also not having code access or control over the platform.
I've come to the conclusion that corporate is sketched out by OSS because there is no one to sue of something goes awry, and that they just don't trust in-house expertise over basically any vendors. To be honest, they are not entirely wrong about the second one: this kind of corporate culture makes good engineers leave.
Another way to look at this: they recognize that they aren't software firms. If you bring in OSS, you have to manage it like a product. You have to recruit, train and manage competent developers. You have to balance competing priorities from "customers" across the firm. That's hard for firms that focus on software, and often impossible for big enterprises.
There's also a cost distribution problem. If you buy commercial software, probably other people are buying it to. Thus you share the development and maintenance costs. You can (hopefully) competent software management too.
I think "open core" is probably best balance here. Yes, we need better funding/pricing models here.
I'd also like to add that most education IT departments tend not to have many people capable of building or maintaining something as complex as an LMS. That means you'd need to hire at least a couple new software devs at software dev salaries and software dev benefits to keep them...which ends up costing MORE per year than it costs to shove 99% of the problem off onto Blackboard support and remove a large source of risk while saving money.
But the outsourcing to proprietary vendors mentality might be a far bigger risk. If all you are doing is processing information those vendors will eventually eat your lunch and you will have financed them every step of the way.
Hum... There's no way to sue any commercial software distributor, it doesn't matter if it's proprietary.
Exactly, especially if it's supposed to be really generic. I've co-founded 2 ed-tech startups targeting niche areas. In both cases there were dozens of competitors in these niches and some specializing in some sub niches. Those niches are most of the time good enough, usually you can find a mobile or web app for anything.
But as mentioned, working with public or private education orgs brings its own challenges. I expect getting any leads there to take years. It's much easier to target consumers directly.
That said, if anyone came up with a generic open-source LMS, on the long-term it could be quite disruptive because everyone in that area is just constantly reinventing the wheel. It's just a ton of incompatible solutions.
There is a whole set of industries for LMSs like B2B training, HR/Compliance/Continuing Ed/Healthcare etc. Then you have Product companies who just need to train their customers, create brand recognition etc. I jus spoke this AM to a startup who works with Kids and they need a "Kid Friendly LMS".I regularly see companies try and twist Moodle/Canvas/EdX for these but usually they end up with in-house duct taped solutions.
The challenge is that each industry can have its own needs and requirements and building something that can truly cater to all audiences in one single monolith LMS is impossible.
I am thinking about building an API first platform where you could build your own interfaces on top while the API does the heavy lifting. For example, you want to start a webinar ? Just call "/api/v1/webinar" and build your own frontend for it. Think of it like "Stripe for eLearning".
Disclosure: I run an LMS company so I know the challenges :) If you are interested in this space, hit me up. I am looking for people to join us.
It seems that many people on HN struggle with understanding the needs of industries because their formative experience is as developers in startups and tech. This really inhibits the ability of folks to attack opportunities later when they want to create a startup. The number of times I've seen enterprises play with startup tools while they wait for the industry incumbent to catchup is very high.
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It is used by FUN (France Université Numérique) a public MOOC platform, and EduLib, which looks like the equivalent in Canada.
Richie : https://richie.education/
FUN : https://www.fun-mooc.fr/fr/
(I do understand that my asking this question almost certainly means I can't answer your question.)
We all are from different backgrounds and industries and same acronyms can mean different things.
I worked in finance, for me LMS is Loan Management System.
My usual thought sequence is "'Neuro-Linguistic Programming'? Uhhh, no... it's not that, not in this space. 'Near Letter Perfect'? Hmmm... don't think so. 'New Lunar Passage'? Has Elon been smoking that stuff again?..."
Eventually I figure it out, but for some weird reason my brain doesn't really want to hang a hook into "Non-Linear Processing"
;)
WAIT. HIT THE BRAKES RIGHT THERE.
Yes. It's open source. But that isn't helping anything. When you find a plugin that does The Thing You Need, you find that it's for a version of Moodle that's several years old and was written by one guy who hasn't touched it since 2014.
There are some plugins that are great and up to date. They are not Open Source. They cost real dollars and aren't terrible.
But if you want Moodle because it's FOSS, then your motivation is wrong.
https://learningequality.org/kolibri/
https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri/
I have a contact who is looking for an LMS for teacher education, and kolibri looks probably appropriate.
While it can be hosted in the cloud, it is designed to run on a local network so that the experience is fast and responsive, and is specific for the needs in places with limited internet. Content and data can be synced to other locations as-needed.
See also https://kolibri.readthedocs.io/
- Existing learning management systems are a mirror (and a victim) of the education system itself, as that's where most of the developers come from: Academic, underfunded and people-focused.
- Academica leads to overflowing complexity. In the whole system, simplicity is punished and complexity is cherished, so you end up with confusing UX.
- Underfunded is pretty self-explanatory
- People-focused is where like in any bureaucracy, nobody really wants to make anyone else replaceable. So instead of with a hard focus on users and learning tracks, you end up with an old system of classes, teachers and students, where of course you have the 10% great teachers that _should_ have run the class for everyone and the 90% that starves their class of any legit info.
From the uni and publisher sides, it's similar, but not completely equal. Both universities and book publishers would never make anything truly great because it would all cannibalize their business.
If you come from the other side and think that the whole learning system is rife for revolution with first-principle thinking, tree-trunk learning and a standard of "Intuition isn't optional" (massive props to https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuition-isnt-optional... ), then you quickly see the other side isn't interested in any fundamental change in their approach (see above for the why).
Furthermore, even if you try, those are the people in charge deciding where their (very tiny) funds go. They will go towards the solution that prioritizes system survival above quality and radical change.
So you see these people rather going towards the content publishers.
For investors, the field is mostly uninteresting for the reasons above, so you don't see any quality invest.
As a parent, I'd love to see someone really cracking edtech, but unfortunately what it would take would be a pretty massive initial investment into a seriously great solution that then proceeds to tackle funding, education system and self-reliance as well. It'd be a philantrophic invest of a few dozen million and then go for a very long road of paying back in small rates.
I'm still up for it, maybe in my next startup :)
this.
part of the problem is that an LMS is used by several different types of people:
everyone has different needs and expectations.also, the users who use the system the most are not the ones paying for it. so they don't get much of a say.
every school has different priorities.
a good system for you may not be a good system for anyone else.
I'm still up for it, maybe in my next startup :)
i have been looking into doing that for a long time, but i had to shelve the idea. i am still interested in approaching this, but i do not believe that a large project without any users right from the start will be successful.
rather the approach should be to find a school, build a custom system for them and expand from there. it is the only way to build a system that actually has users and has a chance of getting funded (by those users)
without those users you'll build something that noone else will want.
The real need is not the LMS but rather the SIS ( student information system ). The available LMS’ are adequate but none of the Student Information Systems are flexible enough to suit the need of most large universities.
A few thoughts:
All LMSes need to be seen as a result from their surroundings. Education is a very bureaucratic sector with lots of money, just not in the places to make a teachers' life easier.
Current applications are in this equilibrium where they are good enough for the field as a whole. Yes, there needs to be innovation and it will happen, just very slowly.
My 2 cts, it can be done by lobbying with politicians, deans and school boards. Getting them on board, creating a pilot program and buzz. That part will take more time than actually developing the software.
Disclaimer, I build such a system for a customer. It was very specific and trimmed down for their use case.