Modern and simple e-learning platform

[ghost]

Project description

Currently we have Moodle that provides this service. However as a student and having contact with university teachers, I could see that Moodle is an old system, and extremely complex for the teacher to configure and manage, besides being an old system. The idea here would be to build an extremely easy to manage and configure system, both by the teacher and the student. The platform should be fully configurable, allow creations of profiles, access, etc, all in a very simple way. With a simple interface, such as the Material Design or something like that.

So far it would just be a reformulation of what already exists, we will filter what is good on other platforms and maintain (forums, questionnaires, surveys, etc).

Features to be discussed:

• Integration with some storage service like Gdrive, Dropbox, etc. For example, the student enters with gmail on the platform. We can upload everything he does on the platform, directly in his GDrive. Because a problem that we have today, mainly for those who are not in the area of ​​technology, is the difficulty of doing and sending your homeworks, are often carried on pen drives, left on the laptop itself, and end up being lost.
• Integration with some collaborative chat tool (slack, matter most, etc). In this example the university or school can have a chat platform self hosted (if it is open source) and integrated with our platform, allowing students easy communication, thus abolishing the difficult communication by email and also leaving the institution with their own data and messages.
• By integrating the chat service above, we can create some chat bots to help students and teachers, regarding the approaching deadlines, warnings and also promote micro-learning, sending students through the chat, suggestions of articles related to the discipline studied, videos , and small contents daily or with the frequency that the teacher wishes.
• Creation of a database of distributed questions. The teacher can, at the time of the creation of his questionnaire, choose which questions he wishes to send to this question database, and thus have a wide variety of questions, made by teachers around the world, and teachers can use any questions available to them. do your tests and quizzes.

The main idea of this project would be to encourage students to use their device for education, rather than prohibiting its use, as is still the case in traditional schools. Do not prohibit technology, and all the things young people do in social networks, but bring education to the midst of these networks.

Relevant Technology

We can use NodeJS, Docker (so that it is easy to set up the development environment for those who wish to contribute), some JS framework (VueJS, ReactJS, etc) and especially good documentation of the system for both installation and use

[ghost]

I have a project with an idea similar to this. The project was stopped a while ago, It is in initial phase when I have stopped it. I created an organization and put the project as public. We can discuss if it is the interest of someone to make this idea happen.

https://github.com/SpaceLearning/space.learning

[svarlamov]

Too bad the OP is ghost now as it'd be so cool to continue this discussion! Nonetheless, we are working on something very similar to what OP describes with our platform, EXLskills which is mostly source-available with various fully open-source modules as well on our GH org. In addition to the core platform, we also developed EOCS which a very easy to use markdown-based (human-readable!) course format with a courseware transpiler that makes it interoperable for conversion and continuous updates with courses that use (or would like to use) the edX courseware format! We hope that this will make the jump for universities significantly less complicated than with any other system around. We are also creating courses on our GitHub, for example, a Java Basics course that you can find live on EXLskills. Moving forward, we're keen to offer a more visual web-based authoring tool as well and are looking to get feedback from the community on the demand for that. Right now we have found building courseware on GitHub in the EOCS markdown-based format to be incredibly fast and easy though. Very cool to see that the community is also frustrated with many of the existing solutions today because we should be able to do so much better in 2018!

For the tech stack, we're using a combination of NodeJS, Go, and ReactJS (all on Docker) for the platform and components, so we hope that it's a real joy for folks to read, setup, and contribute to the source! We are also really excited to work with others in the community who are committed to open education, free courseware, and building next-generation standards to make professional/tertiary e-learning significantly less lame (and maybe even exciting?), more accessible, and substantially more effective!

There is a commercial aspect to the hosted EXLskills platform, and that is our chatbot, aptly-named, Sage, and the ability to ask questions and interact live with experts. It doesn't require a time commitment to become an EXLskills instructor and you get paid directly for the work that you do helping learners and teaching our chatbot. We also have a mobile application for instructors to help students anywhere, anytime -- imagine helping people learn while taking the train to work (btw, it's not pennies -- you set your own rate and choose how much you earn, it's a free market)!

Folks who are interested can also follow the dev more closely on our discord server, check out the current issues in the tracking repo, and apply to become an instructor for free! We're also working on a micro docker-compose devstack to make your first commit even easier than it is today. Please feel free to get in touch directly with us as well in any way you find convenient (GH issues, discord, or our website's built-in chat, etc.) and we'd be happy to talk/collaborate!

[BenjaminHoegh]

What is the diffrent between this idea and other e-learning website like tutsplus or udemy ?

[svarlamov]

@BenjaminHoegh The main difference is that the courses are all open on GitHub so that anyone can contribute. Right now on all of those sites, you still have (a) single-contributor/creator mindset; and (b) a huge focus on paid content. I believe that both of these are huge limitations to the accessibility and democratization of the best learning resources -- and this is what the purpose of EXLskills is.

[BenjaminHoegh]

@svarlamov sounds like tutsplus, as all how-to tutorials are free and only ebooks and videos are paid, and it's all on GitHub as well as anybody can help translate it

[svarlamov]

@BenjaminHoegh Still seems like a very distant service -- and when you refer to open source or all on github, that's not the case at all with tutsplus... The platform is all closed and so are the posts -- just the fact that they post some of the example code onto their github doesn't make their 'courses' open or on github...