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

157 points by seestraw ↗ HN
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?

163 comments

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aneeshnl
You can try this - https://open.edx.org/
drcongo
I tried Open EdX once, it was unbelievably difficult to get it up and running, despite it being a Django app and me being pretty experienced with Django.
thraxil
I work for a company that customizes and runs Open edX and you're not wrong.
drcongo
I did eventually give up!
TrispusAttucks
The underlying protocol most [1] LMS use, [2] LTI, is horrible (IMHO). That may have something to do with the quality of platforms built in top of it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Tools_Interoperabil...

seestraw
Hmm do LMSes really get built for the LTI protocol in mind? Or do they add it later for compatibility?
pas
LTI is an afterthought for LMSes.

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 :)

Uehreka
Ah LTI, it’s been a while.

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.

PeterisP
While LMS's support LTI, I have rarely seen it actually used; usually you would have all or almost all content hosted "natively" on the LMS you use.
agent00shoe
I work for an HR compliance training company and we use a heavily modified version of Moodle in combination with our own back end. Moodle was originally chosen as an MVP for the company and it is good at playing industry-standard formats, like SCORM and AICC. But Moodle's code base is around 20 years old and very cumbersome to modify so we do plan on moving to 100% custom in the future.
billpg
What's an LMS?

(I do understand that my asking this question almost certainly means I can't answer your question.)

Megha11
I am wondering the same thing. Thanks for posting your comment.
raesene9
Learning Management System - manages training, students etc
nick88msn
Learning Management System. An online tool to manage physical and online courses students wiki test etc.
HatchedLake721
I don’t know why but it always gets on my nerves when people decide to address a multinational forum with people from every corner of the world and ask for their time and attention, but at the same time decide to save 2 seconds of their own time to avoid typing out “Learning Management System (LMS)”.

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.

mikro2nd
I have the same issue with numerous TLAs, most frequently around here: "NLP".

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"

;)

folli
TLA?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
bmakdbd
Errr isn’t it natural language processing?
marginalia_nu
It's also a branch of pickup artist pseudoscience.
mikro2nd
Yes, yes it is.

Aks my brain to pick that one first, though.... ehhhh.

elcomet
You just did the same with TLA ... Thanks to another commenter who explained it
callmeal
I thought it was a Laboratory Management System (for tracking samples).
dragonwriter
I've usually see that as a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS)
biztos
LMS stands for Learning Management System in case anyone else didn’t know.

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.

PeterisP
IDK, in our local universities Moodle-based systems are very much used by the learners as that's the primary way of receiving and looking up all learning material other the lectures themselves (and now with covid, also the recordings of remote lectures), the organizational information e.g. schedule changes and other comunication, feedback, and of receiving and submitting assignments and, in some cases, tests; it's essentially the primary "portal" used by students every day.
biztos
Thanks for explaining, I stand corrected!
grosswait
Not a misnomer. Features of an LMS are used by the learners
ianbooker
Is (online) education is an attractive market? Before Covid, the answer was: Meh. Lot of competition, little funding in most countries. And Moodle (or Canvas) is a good enough solution, both also enable kind of third-party marketplaces. We looked at different LMS solutions and some better ones could best be described as "Moodle distributions", centered around a theme and some plugins.
stef25
Moodle seems like Joomla. The support forums are also full of posts by what seems like "the least bad IT person" in the education dept wondering how the hell this thing works, posting all kinds of confusing statements and code.

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

dspillett
In my limited experience (mostly hearing complaints from others who have to use them, rather than personal experience) there appears to be a lack of non-open-source options too!

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.

chkgk
Check out OpenOLAT. Many universities use it and if offers great integration for assignments, self-tests, video-calls (big blue button), etc.

https://www.openolat.com

OJFord
> The state-of-the-art seems to be Moodle or Canvas which are designed for universities - they use archaic UI and features.

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.

teekert
Ah, got interested because I thought it was about Lab Management Systems ;)

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

seeekr
We're offering a number of courses on top of Moodle, and it's not great. UX/UI is terrible, various bugs are haunting us and our users regularly. Moodle seems to be extremely complex, and far from modern in any regard. I have the same question as OP.
endymi0n
I've been wondering the same and came to this conclusion:

- 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 :)

akie
Even if you have great world-class software, you will get bogged down so easily in university politics and the slooooooow moving oil tankers that they are that I would strongly recommend you to spend your time and energy elsewhere.
rvanlaar
I wondered the same as well. My idea was to change this and build one that worked....

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.

em-bee
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.

this.

part of the problem is that an LMS is used by several different types of people:

    - students
    - teacher
    - parents
    - administrators
    - other staff
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.

cmaggiulli
I’ve worked in academia as a SDE or Product Manager for 3 different universities ( Columbia, MIT, and an online school ). From my experience the LMS is always a COTs product with very little customization by IT. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it ( from the college side at least ).

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.

cors-fls
Check out Richie. It is a modern MIT-licensed LMS built with Django and React.

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/

seeekr
Thanks for the link. IIUC Richie is more of a CMS for courses and related info that can integrate with an LMS like edX, but it's not an LMS itself.
Jacqued
Hey! I'm one of the maintainers of Richie. That's exactly right, it's meant to be a web portal in front of one or more LMS.
cors-fls
Thanks for the correction. My mistake.
anonymousDan
Apart from underfunding, I think fundamentally the problem is that a good LMS needs to be extremely flexible and customisable to support different learning styles of students, and also pedagogic techniques which vary a lot across subjects and disciplines. It's a complex problem to solve IMHO, with the greatest risk being an overly simplified and constraining system that ends up getting in the way of learning.
Jacqued
I work on a team where we build around and run Open edX. It's incredibly complicated to run because it's not built as an open source product. It's just that edX open sources their software after the fact, so they're not investing in making it easy for anyone to run, of to contribute features.

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.

sails
> incredibly complicated to run because it's not built as an open source product

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...

Jacqued
I'm not an ops guy, but I know it was a constant source of trouble in our team and a large challenge to keep it running smoothly. For us it took 2-3 experienced engineers something like 2 years to have a stable and smoothly running production environment at scale.

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.

sails
Thanks, that is exactly what I need to avoid. Will have a look at that.
trabant00
I find commercial LMSs to be full of dark patterns that substitute learning and value with gaming-like interfaces with achievements, medals, bars to be filled, check-boxes to be checked, Netflix-like hard to navigate to give the appearance of endless choice, lack of human curation so you can only find the most popular but not the most valuable and so on.

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.

867-5309
having worked for a company which made LMS software I can vouch for this. buzzwords like "gamification" and "user stories" were bandied about daily with next-to-nil privacy concerns. want to implicitly record every student's interaction? there are a handful of APIs for that..

"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)."

dinakazakevich
Check out LearnWorlds, they are not open-source but they are pretty good with customization and branding, they've offer community feature, assignments and stuff https://www.learnworlds.com/
2Gkashmiri
GP was asking about open source software
AIrtemis
I would really recommend Eduflow here. Have tried several LMS's and it has an intuitive platform that resembles notion. We're experimenting with its peer learning components at the moment.
mkl
That doesn't seem to be open source? Their home page [1] has lots of stuff about pricing, sales, requesting quotes, etc., and their GitHub [2] has lots of forks of open source projects but not a main LMS project as far as I could see. It also isn't clear it's an LMS itself, as it has a use case example "Extending your LMS's capabilities", and the pricing page has an "LMS Integration" enterprise feature: "Integration to the Learning Management System (LMS) you're using. We support all major LMS's."

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

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

utdiscant
Correct, we are not open source (I am the CEO). But if that is not a hard requirement, then I do actually think we offer a lot of the things mentioned in the post.
immnn
Good question and very relative nowadays. You should have a look at ILIAS. It’s been developed by German universities. However, it’s very versatile and pluggable.

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.

ktpsns
Can second that. Have worked 10 years with ILIAS (in all roles, from coding extensions up to editing content). It is a very solid platform with a rapidly moving team and an ever increasing set of features.