![]() ![]() ![]() 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 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. Then you have Product companies who just need to train their customers, create brand recognition etc. There is a whole set of industries for LMSs like B2B training, HR/Compliance/Continuing Ed/Healthcare etc. Most people who are not familiar with LMSs think of Blackboard/Moodle/Canvas/EdX and mostly for academic/schools. One reason is that is is really tough to define what an LMS does since it can serve various use cases. To be honest, they are not entirely wrong about the second one: this kind of corporate culture makes good engineers leave. 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. ![]() 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. More frustrating is when we buy what are clearly simple reskins of OSS with terrible support from eg Oracle. Partly it's a question of "support" (getting RHEL instead of CentOS) even though in practice support is often rather poor and distant. Corporate would usually rather buy anything than "invest" in open source. I had the exact same experience working in a major bank. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. >The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. ![]() Somehow we need to move to the next chapter of the book they started writing. 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. But from an education perspective what matters are not smooth appearances and gimmicks but "educational outcomes". It may be a very relevant aspect (eg if young students puke at the UX it is not of much help). The "archaic UI and features" comment hints maybe at too narrow and technical view. I think especially now with the pandemic experience it has become very clear how rich, complicated and demanding the educational process actually is. An education platform is not a CMS and its not a social media platform. In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap. The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. ![]()
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