We have been running our small academy on Moodle for the past year. We were SO impressed with ourselves – hacking away at plugins and themes – editing and tweaking – learning php on the fly… working through nights to get some function working – nagging and cajoling and downright FORCING lecturers, staff and students to use the damn thing! Moodle is only user-friendly if you were part of the team that learnt how to use it by hacking it to bits! Moodle has become a swear word to all students and staff. Nonetheless, we were very proud of our Moodle site… UNTIL… the management team started using Highrise.

Highrise is like breathing. Instinctive. Simple. Elegant. The management team needed no training. It makes me (the COO) feel safe – as long as my team are bcc-ing the dropbox – everything will be fine. It doesn’t take them any extra effort or time to stay organized. We don’t have to tweak anything to make it work for us – it fits like a glove. Now I want the same for our LMS.

I came across this post while searching for “LMS similar to Highrise”.

If there is anyone out there who can develop a gradebook plugin for one of the 37signals products – you will have our eternal gratitude.

sonya@academyidt.co.za

In a similar light to your article, I recently wrote about my experiences using Backpack and Writeboard (also from 37signals) in a group project in my class. It worked so much better than anything else I’d ever used in a group project! I would love to see schools offer such tools directly to students! Anyhow, if you’re interested, you can find the article at http://techinch.com/2010/01/11/writeboard-class-projects-reinvented/

I like your idea of using Basecamp, Campfire together to create an LMS. In fact, I might even think about trying to build a third party tool for it. Then again, maybe not, but good idea.

Besides bureaucracy, there is another reason Blackboard has the market. Blackboard has relationships with Book Publishers. Textbooks publishers create blackboard versions of their courses which makes it relatively easy for professors to customize Blackboard for their own course which may or may not be a good for the students depending upon the textbook author, publisher, and the the professor’s customizations. If a college/university were to move to Basecamp & Campfire or any other LMS, they would need to learn how to import the Blackboard course from the textbook publisher. I guess that many LMS developers often forget about course creation and development.

One aspect, I always liked about seeing when Students log into Blackboard, is I could use that as a grading aspect and as a matter of recourse for those students who claim to be doing work, but then not actually logging in and doing the work. Although, one could substitute that easily with some other form.

Good idea.

You raise an important point – how a subscription model would fix things. In my opinion, the main benefit of subscription based software is that it provides the newest software. It allows the developer to continually make software improvements and introduce new features. And that’s the whole point. Only in rare cases can you reach a “finished” stage in an application where you don’t have to make changes anymore. Upgrades force the decision makers to make more decisions – whether to upgrade. People don’t like making decisions, because they are complex, and because they cost money, so they often resort to not make them at all, which in turn leads to the situation we’re in right now with Blackboard.

If my school has not chosen to upgrade in 2.5 years, and it’s not due to the licensing model, what could be the reason? I doubt they simply don’t care enough. And if upgrades are part of the package, as you say, I don’t see any reason not to upgrade.

My feeling is that we don’t upgrade because of bad reasons: an antiquated business model that focuses on exploiting the customer rather than providing the best possible product and a bureaucratic structure where the decision makers are not the users.

Basecamp does allow you to export all your data if you are an account administrator, either in raw XML or in HTML format.

I am aware of that limitation, but I am wondering why you need to know what a student has done while logged in. How would that improve your performance as a professor? I think that if you care enough to raise that question, you don’t depend on that feature anyways.

Sounds intriguing. Is it going to be for individual courses/professors, or university-wide?

Professors can request more info at: http://euclid-project.org/beta