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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

The cynicism never seems to subside here. Moodle was and is a great OPEN-SOURCE (FREE) learning management system that works on just about any web server. It is highly customizable and very easy to install and manage.

I've managed a Moodle install for my university for many years without any hiccups. I've trained lots of teachers on how to use it BUT usually they would just figure it out by themselves because it's quite intuitive.

A little optimism and positivity doesn't hurt now and again.

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I doubt a student ever liked it, when I went to school it was great when they moved away from moodle

I'm surprised there's really much alternative. My schools either used Moodle or Blackboard and Blackboard was absolutely awful since it was a product of just acquiring and suing companies out of competition.

Now there’s canvas as another paid alternative to blackboard. I think it’s seeing relatively wide adoption.

My school uses Canvas and I think general sentiment is pretty positive from both students and faculty.

Canvas suffers from being originally designed for use in elementary (K-12) school, and then kind of wedged into college. On the teaching side it kind of assumes that classes will always be relatively small (running a 100+ student seminar class in Canvas is a nightmare) and that you, the teacher, don't mind performing the same actions over and over and...

But, it's one of the few LMSs designed post-Web 2.0 so things that require a refresh or reload in BB, etc., generally happen much more smoothly.

IMO all LMS's are complicated with a lot of customization knobs and poor UX/workflows.

These days I like Brightspace (aka D2L) the best, but that could be just because the way I interact with it.

(I write LMS integrations for a living).

On the other hand our school was moving to Moodle from something else (I think it was called Blackboard? Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn?) and it was an absolute pleasure compared to the alternative (which a few courses still used). There were definitely a few clunky parts (like the form) but overall it worked, was reasonably fast and wasn't awful. This was a student PoV though, really I just needed it to render some rich-text content provided by the prof and the occasional assignment submission or quiz. IDK if setting these things up was particularly painful.

This was about 8 years ago now, IDK if it got worse or better since then.

Hope your school wasn't moving to Blackboard ...

yes, it's open source. It can still be bad, no? I was forced to use it because there is no other sane way to get specific information about students and share stuff easily (aka without supporting your own DNS-entry...). It's still horrible.

And I stopped caring for the moodle-community after I found a forum-post (in 200X) which outlined all the problems they have today and got told: f** off, you don't know how to program.

Did you ever have performance issues with quizzes especially for courses/installation with large users? How did you deal with performances issues especially if you had resource constraints?

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