IGDORE LMS open.edx.org

Organisations IGDORE
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IGDORE needs a learning platform (LMS) to start offer education online. We’re looking into different SaaS (Software as a Service) providers for the Open EdX platform (which is fully open source):

https://open.edx.org/get-started/

There are 13 alternatives. Anyone knows anything about any of them? Any prior experience?

I think all 13 offer free trials. I’ve created a free 14 days trial with MOOCit. Will do the same with Graspway. The latter seems to have some integration with Wordpress, which could potentially be beneficial since Wordpress is huge, has a stable economy and a great tech support.

If anyone wants to create a free trial with any of the 13 alternatives and help us out in our search for the best SaaS for IGDORE, please do, we would really appreciate it!

Please share below any feedback you might have about any of these SaaS.

Ping @global_board (in particular @pcmasuzzo & @dbernt). And perhaps e.g. @mkcor, @sam.williams, or @amelia.zein have some thoughts on this?

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I am not really an expert, I am going to spend some time researching online/asking some people in other communities. I will post my results in this thread (thanks @rebecca for initiating it).

I already found this article: Choosing an Open edX Service Provider: What You Should Know? which seems to list key aspects in the matter. More to follow :slight_smile:

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Awesome!

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An earlier discussion (last year at least) send us to look into moodle. I think most discussion happened on slack and results were on the wiki Next MOOC platform · OpenScienceMOOC/Main Wiki · GitHub

I would encourage you to look into open badges (which are platform independent) and maybe start from there, I have recently followed a course (https://platform.europeanmoocs.eu/course_open_badges_for_open_science) and especially part 3 was very informative on what one should do when developing a curriculum idea. see https://youtu.be/UumxncYO2ZA as a starter.

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Hi @rebecca,

Sorry, I don’t have any direct experience with Open edX.

I was once approached by Pluralsight to create a MOOC on something scientific Python, but ended up not following through. Pluralsight is very industry-oriented and I guess it’s not open-source.

Best,

Marianne

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Hi @Rebecca, I’m afraid I still haven’t gotten very far with looking into online learning and teaching platforms, so I’m not much use here. But Open EdX looks interesting, I hope you find the right provider.

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Would it maybe be an option to ask a University to join forces? I know that the University of Zurich uses Open EdX (https://openedx.uzh.ch/) and I’d be happy to create the contact (I did my PhD there). Might also generate a nice collaboration with the Center for Reproducible Science.

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I’ve looked through them all and there’s only three that seem suitable: OpenCraft, eduNEXT and Graspway. Of these I’d start with eduNEXT because they seem focused on smaller customers and have the free LITE option “to get started and test”.

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The platform costs quite a lot to host and maintain so that might be a reason for universities to join forces. At the same I doubt that a traditional university such as UZH would be interested in allowing IGDORE to use their platform for our courses unless we can pay significantly for it. And if we anyway pay, then I guess we would like to use our own logo. Relevant here is also that we sooner or later (maybe sooner) may want to apply to the Swedish government to become an ‘enskild utbildningsanordnare’, which means that we would gain the formal status of college/university. If doing that, then the online EdX platform would become our main “campus” so to speak.

But your suggestion is very inspiring, Heidi, and may lead to new interesting ideas!

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