Ask HN: What are most innovative college programs in online/digital instruction?

6 points·FluidDjango··7 comments

So many campuses seem to be stuck with Blackboard/WebCT or DesireToLearn. A few are using Moodle.

Anyone here attended/taught_at a campus that was doing something more exciting, innovative, engaging-to-students, productivity-enhancing-for-faculty?

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Not sure if this is still kept up-to-date, but there a list of Course Development tools at http://www.web-miner.com/detools.htm

You might want to look at www.epsilen.com - owned by NY Times, I believe. Not free or OSS, but more affordable and comes with access to NY Times content.

I'm a senior at Penn State and we use Angel. It's decent.

Thanks for that feedback. Searching about Angel reveals it's been purchased (as others have) by Blackboard. The past behavior of BB suggests this may not upgrade BB as much as it may just reduce the competition.

Where is the Linux of courseware?

Moodle is OSS. Why not get involved and contribute there?

Right. If anything is the "Linux of courseware" it's Moodle.

Personally, though, I think the whole concept of a "course management system" goes away in time.

BTW, we've been using Opensimulator: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page for synchronous sessions and collaborative projects, and it works pretty well. Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page and Project Wonderland: http://openwonderland.org/ are also worth a look.

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