Evaluation of Open Source Learning Management Systems - 2005
About this Evaluation
In 2005 the edutech group was repeatedly asked by members of the Swiss e-learning community to report on the quality of current open source (OS) e-learning management systems (LMS) or course management systems (CMS). Since our last evaluation in 2003, which considered only commercial products, many open source products have improved in quality and gained considerable acceptance in higher education organizations.
The main goals of this evaluation are
- to help higher education institutions choose an open source LMS that can be deployed at the institutional level (some Swiss higher education institutions do not yet have an officially supported and maintained LMS),
- to validate the LMS choice of those higher education institutions who do have an officially supported and maintained LMS at the institutional level, and
- to find out which open source LMS are adequate to be deployed at a national level (professional central hosting for higher education institutions).
It is not the goal of this evaluation - indeed is it not possible - to select one winning product. Although it may seem obvious, we repeat that there can be no such thing as the best LMS. A product needs to be chosen depending on the circumstances of a particular institution. Therefore, the evaluation results should be interpreted with your specific situtation in mind. If you would like the edutech group to help you apply the findings of this evaluation to your institution's situation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Evaluated Products
Currently, we are aware of about 40 open source LMS products. As we do not have the resources to evaluate all of them in detail, we established a list of 7 criteria that have to be entirely fulfilled in order for an LMS to be considered. To see the criteria and all the LMS visit the LMS long list.
| Product | Producer | Version | Evaluation Date | Evaluation Report | ||
| ATutor | Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, Canada | 1.5.1 | August 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |
| Claroline | Catholic University of Louvain / CERDECAM (Belgium) | 1.6.1 | August 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |
| dotLRN | OpenACS consortium | 2.2 | September 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |
| Ilias | University of Cologne (Germany) and open-source community | 3.4.1 | June 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |
| Moodle | Martin Dougiamas and open-source community | 1.5.2 | August 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |
| OLAT | University of Zurich | 3.2 | September 2005 | summary | short report | detailed report |