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Ask HN: Where are the decent elearning platforms?

8 points by Terrence_B ↗ HN
Hi guys,

I'm working on a small startup to deliver training courses to a niche market via an online learning portal.

I'm trying to avoid writing my own platform (yak-shaving) and have been looking at all the existing learning management systems (LMS) both open source and commercial.

In general, they are all rather bloated and ugly. I'm after something fairly slick and simple to just manage users, deliver lessons via slides, screencasts, quizzes and discussion forums etc.

Surely someone has attempted the 37Signals of elearning? Although, I suspect that's not what sells in this overcrowded market.

Do you know of a nice option I might have missed or been through this yourself?

Thanks so much!

7 comments

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jasonlbaptiste
talk to markbao founder of classleaf.com
tptacek
Classleaf looks nice, but I'm not sure it solves the problem the poster asked about (though I may be projecting my own problems onto the question). Classleaf handles administrivia for brick-and-mortar classes. E-learning platforms roll out, deliver, and track progress for entirely online classes.

I wonder if Mark thought about doing a simplified version of Classleaf for small businesses. My brother runs a small music school/studio with 5 teachers, and my kids go to martial arts class down the street, and both of those companies would benefit from scheduling and class logistics.

Terrence_B
Yeah, that's right. Looking to put the material online and the students work through it by themselves. Taking the approach that the teacher can be replaced by the community helping one another. This is a whole other debate though isn't it... :)
strooltz
I wouldn't say it's nice but moodle is an option... haven't used it in several years so I'm not sure as to the current state of the project...
Terrence_B
Thanks, Moodle seems like a fairly popular one although I think there are some nicer ones like eFront.

Doing this as a startup as opposed to company internal training or an educational institution means that you want to present yourself well and create a user experience that you're proud to send your customers to. Seems hard to find!

skippybosco
@Terrence_B: Good to see that you've stumbled across eFront. Not sure what version you looked at, but be sure to check out the 3.6 version being released at the end of January (beta available on the eFront website).. pretty radical change to the theme engine, tighter integration options, etc.

There has been support for add-on modules for a while now, but for the hackers, the 3.7 release later this year is a fairly big architecture change and opens up the entire platform similar to how Wordpress manages their plugins in terms of hooking, etc.

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll do what I can to assist.

camwest
We are a small startup working on a video based learning platform http://woople.com/. It is currently in a private beta and we are hoping to have a more public marketing website/launch by June 2010. It is definitely not the traditional LMS though.

LMS is a crutch a lot of organizations use to avoid having to truly train and educate their employees and instead stick them in front of a machine. If you are looking for merely compliance training, woople definitely isn't the right tool. That said, feel free to reach out to me: cameron (at) woople.com, I'd love to see the format of your courseware and determine if it would make sense to work together.