Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?

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

This may mean that it's a hard space to do something "very good" in; compare and contrast to "ERP" systems. Or "enterprise" systems generally -- an LMS is definitely an enterprise system. (Meaning: purchased for an entire organization; those with the most power in purchasing decisions are for the most part not those with roles as core users; often purchased based on "feature checklists", or "what are my famous peers using"; needs to support a kind of 'workflow', which can vary drastically among different organizational customers or even within a single customer).

Consider when it's a pitfall to actually "give the customers what they are asking for". (pitfall to quality/ease-of-use but not always to sales)

Those making procurement decisions need to have someone to call and complain and ask the to fix things -- even if they don't fix them. It's important for the careers of those making procurement solutions to have someone else to blame -- and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." This entity to blame hypothetically could be a vendor offering installation/hosting/support for an open source solution... but it's a risky business to be in, when those doing procuring would rather take the safe/familiar route, and the product you are offering installation/hosting/support for, any competitor can too.

If there is a good one, I don't know about it. :)

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.

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.

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"

(Both an example, and a reaction to the irony of “TLA” being referenced without a definition above)

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 commonly run on a local network so that the experience is fast and responsive. Content and data can be synced to other locations as-needed.

See also https://kolibri.readthedocs.io/

Some of those reasons: - integration with other (client)systems - advanced payment integrations, like bulk sales to schools, free accounts for teachers, combination packages with books (separate ISBN's) etc. - ability to introduce way more types of content presentations and learning systems - work really well on mobile - make the UX way, way better - different ways of tracking progress, Xapi or something country specific

It was and is quite the investment, but they have complete control and they can offer something nobody else can.

We've looked at other solutions both open-source and commercial and most of them truly suck. They either contain too much or too little or require heavy customisation, or the UX is appalling.

Once you need to onboard organisations or schools, each with multiple departments and their demands/regulations, you're in for a world of hurt unless you can adapt your platform.

It really depends on what a 'teaching business' will be for you.

- 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:

    - students
    - teacher
    - parents
    - administrators
    - other staff

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.

On the team I'm a part of, our strategy is to build open source tools around Open edX, using it as a site builder that stitches together all our external services (video hosting, live conferencing, course content, quizzes, web-facing portal, forum, etc.). That is, until we cover enough scope that we can start to replace it with a flexible and lightweight LMS that would basically just do the aggregation.

IMO it's not necessarily a good fit for the LMS category to try and build a gigantic software codebase that handles everything the way every single learning institution wants it. You end up with a glorified site builder with a bunch of specialized features tacked on.

Would you suggest it as an option to a team with limited devops budget?

The documentation seems reasonable comprehensive. Do you have a brief summary of issues?

https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-installing-configuri...

If you start from scratch today things may have gotten better. You might want to look at https://github.com/overhangio/tutor, I know Régis has been hard at work making it easier to run Open edX.

Canvas may seem a little old school but I really like it. It’s not that hard to extend, API is good (they even expose graphql to students) and it’s fast. It feels like it was made by humans, as opposed to every other LMS that feels like it was made by a bunch of people in suits for school administrators. (Much like GitHub in that respect.)

My son was all about it obvious haha.

Salesforce LMS (trailheads) is really good and although not open source they are planning or already have released it as a product.

Not exactly a LMS but the open source ERP system Odoo offers a lot you need to sell and provide courses. You can also do live trainings using the Jitsi integration.

Odoo is solid web-software built with Python (and HTML, CSS, JS of course). It's quite easy to extend.

There's a demo at https://demo.odoo.com

(Disclaimer: I'm an official Odoo partner)

1. Can you tell me more about the scalability of Odoo LMS for 100-1000 simultan users. What server resources is needed?

2. In the context of using the Odoo LMS, it is a good idea to have the ERP and LMS sharing same web server resouces? In production you use the LMS as a separate Odoo instance, but sharing same database as the main ERP?

Thank you in advance!

If your interest is in selling then yes, nobody has done the work for you for free. Why would they? Open source is geared towards sharing, not selling.

"The Experience API (or xAPI) is a new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline)."

There is not one "learning" platform that covers all these cases, let alone cover well. The activities and the learning modes are too diverse, I would not trust any single entity to cover all of them.

But, as for open sourcing the platform. I think it's tricky because if you're in tech chances are you'll want to build your own custom platform, if you're not into tech you'll use an existing SAAS service or outsource someone to build it for you in which case there's almost a 0% chance it'll end up being open source because the goal there is to hire someone on demand to build and lightly maintain it, not champion an open source project for years to come.

Plus the decisions you make when building the platform are super custom based on what you want.

Are you going to support the idea of buying multiple packages for 1 course, such as package A and package B at different prices? How will you handle upgrades? What about subscriptions vs single purchases? Can students comment on things? Will it track and remember progress? Will you have searchable captions? What about handling time sensitive discounts? Which payment providers are you going to support?

Then there's the whole idea of optimizing the course consumption experience for your audience, for example a tech course could be displayed and have features that are much different than a Yoga course.

There's about 100 other questions to ask here and chances are your combination of features isn't going to be the same as someone else so then you end up with limited platforms that try to do everything and create an average at best experience, or you drill down and build a super niche platform that's great for what you want to do but maybe not everyone else.

All of this makes it very hard to have a successful open source project IMO.

I also found it a bit complex at first. But after an hour or so it started to make sense.

I was well versed in PHP, but my gosh was that idiosyncratic even then…

https://www.openolat.com

The UX for students is just, sadly, terrible - "old" feeling and difficult to navigate. The UX for learning/content designers is just as bad - a nightmare to create effective content, with poorly considered UI features and constraints.

Hoping to find some great alternatives in the comments.

We started collaborating with them right after they launched, and just finished our first course on their platform.

I also wish there was a good open source alternative but the revenue sharing with maven is fair, the team is a joy to work with, and the product is improving rapidly.

Its hard to make a neat product because you have to accommodate the whims of as many institutions as possible.

You might have to bite the bullet with moodle. Its a learning curve but you can eventually beat it into submission to do what you want.

Or build yourself using modules on a vanilla drupal.

The tough thing about LTI is that it assumes the piece of content you’re trying to serve is a single resource. So if you’re serving a video or a single HTML page, then cool. If your page is some sort of JS player that loads the content from an API after the page loads, you basically have to create a relay race of auth systems to tie it all together. This is a super common format (a JS lesson player that lazy loads each page/slide as needed) so a ton of people have had to solve this problem in different ways.

The standard is a classic patchwork of whatever is used by IMS members currently.

LTI 1.3 is the current active version, which deprecated 2.0.

But wait LTI is actually a collection of standards. AGS (assignment and grade services), DL (deep linking), dynamic registration, etc.

And they are optional, and LMSes implement them in slightly different ways.

So good times.

But wait, there's also the afterthought of 1.3 compatibility jury rigged on top of 1.0/1.1 implementations. Which leads to comical implementation details poking their ugly heads out :)

There's so many excellent SAAS platforms ... there should be something better than Moodle.

I mean it's not shiny, but it worked fine, what else should app like that do?

As a company we are offering several integrations.

ILIAS is very strong when it comes to collaboration, but it doesn’t offer video conferences out of the box. Actually, I also don’t see ILIAS in that position. For such requirements you should definitely have a look at other solutions like MS Teams, Zoom etc. just because of scalability. Here in Germany mentioned solutions aren’t allowed because of privacy concerns. However, there are open source solutions followed by a system offered by the state for schools and other educational instances.

I will agree with others that Blackboard has made it very difficult for entry.

I think the problem is that everyone wants something slightly different from an LMS. If they are lucky there is something out there that works the way they want out-of-the-box, otherwise they end up trying to bend something else into the target shape or using something that tries to please everyone so ends up overly complex and unwieldy.

> which are very restrictive in their feature set, and not customizable

What you want to customise could be key. Can you name a non-open option that you think would be at least close to ideal for your plans, without too much panel-beating to change its shape, and why that one in particular is attractive? This might help with getting better suggestions for alternatives.

[1] https://www.eduflow.com/

[2] https://github.com/orgs/eduflow/repositories

And it’s a misnomer as far as I can tell, because it’s a system for managing the teaching, or the administration maybe, but is not actually used by the learners.

Learning Management System... Meh. I never managed my learning.

Let me add 'Blackboard'. What a joke of a piece of software. If I agreed with people who think blackboards are bad and should (have) be(en) replaced with whiteboards, the joke might be 'ha ha it's old and crusty it's even in the name'. I'm a few years out of university so I wouldn't know where to start on its problems - though one thing in particular I remember was it's weekly offline for maintenance window on Wednesday afternoons - but the university paid a disgusting amount of money for it. Lecturers thought it was crap too. The Computing dept. had its own system (built and maintained as a Summer project for undergrads I believe) that did mostly the same (well, the bits it needed of course) that worked great and must have cost ~nothing. They were starting to be forced on to Blackboard as I left.

tl;dr: It's like SAP for universities.

That said, end users (students / learners) need not be bothered by the sad state of the current backend: you can configure Moodle so they'll only get to see the easy parts (I've seen Moodle used in primary education on two different occasions).

As for your requirements, it looks as though Moodle's got them all covered (depending on the details of course). Except maybe for the live classes, which will probably require a 3rd party plugin.

Other things to consider:

- Cost of customization: Moodle developers are harder find than, say, WordPress developers. Putting something together based on WordPress might also get you there, for less money.

- Edtech standards: Moodle supports H5P, SCORM & LTI out of the box (WordPress has limited support for SCORM & LTI, full support for H5P). This means you can integrate your Moodle based platform with a lot of other systems, offering your courses to customers on their own platforms, when they might otherwise not be willing to do business with you.

- Community support: Moodle's the largest open source LMS out there, and it has excellent support forums. There's also commercial support available through Moodle partners (and, shameless plug, parties such as myself, who offer Moodle customization services).

- Shopping cart / payment features: you can put individual courses behind a paywall, but overall Moodle does not really support e-commerce features (except through integrations such as Edwiser Bridge).

- Installation & deployment: since you're looking for an open source solution, I'm going to assume you want to host the platform yourself. In that case, you might want to look for a system that's easy to install and maintain. WordPress & Moodle have got you covered there, since they're based on LAMP, for which a lot of documentation and external expertise is available.

- Enterprise features: do you require features like advanced customizable reporting, integrations with HR systems, and certification programs? Then you might want to look into Totara. I wouldn't call it open source, though you can host and customize the source code yourself once you buy their per seat licensing (still cheaper than most enterprise LMS solutions out there). Totara's based on a Moodle fork, although they're slowly moving away from the Moodle core code base.

[Edited for layout; added clarification on Totara]

* Education is socialized. That is, people don't pay for it, instead the state buys it. At university level, this is slightly less true but the state still provides loans which may never be paid back. Even for the rich, who buy their own education, the sector is still extremely inefficient since the main value added is not from the teachers but from the other students. That is, universities are fundamentally clubs (in the economic sense of the term) rather than businesses.

* As a result, there is no payoff for innovating.

* As a result, there is no innovation worth mentioning. This applies to software, teaching, course design and everything else.

* At some point the existing system may become so bad that individual consumers seek alternatives. Then, there may be money to be made in teaching people. Until then, you are condemning yourself to a precarious existence. Good luck!

I mean thats not true. It means there are different pressures for innovating.

Buying a system in that will reduce the number of staff hours needed to do admin by 5% clear sale.

Buying in staff who cost 3-5x what a normal admin would cost, for a open ended, unsupported software project that has a high chance of failure? not a clear sale.

Schools are not tech companies, they do not have the capacity to spin up a software stack. They want software they can buy, and buy support at the same time.

Moreover it's also provably false. Education is big business in most countries and a significant portion of gdp (and often not "socialise" either, universities, private schools, private certificate/education providers etc.). Despite of that nobody managed to "disrupt" education yet, because education is difficult and most "small, agile" providers in this space are awful, mainly preying on the desperate.

Regarding good lms, to the OP it really depends on what you want. Systems like Canvas, Moodle are catering for universities/school. The requirements for such large organisations might be very different. Why do you find canvas/Moodle bad for example?