Free or Open Source Collaboration/eLearning Software [closed]

Question

I am looking for open source or free data collaboration software. Specifically this is for a non-profit organization that wants to teach remote students how a foreign language. The idea is that an instructor would teach a class and there would be up to 10 students in the class at a time. The instructor would be able to post slides or other teaching material and the students would be able to see it on their computers remotely. Video is not required but audio is a must. Any recommendations?

Also if there have been any reviews or feature comparison amongst these products, I would be interested in hearing about them.

Answer 1

The BlindSide site also listed these other projects:

• ePresence
• OpenMeetings
• DimDim
• WebHuddle

All opensource as well.

Answer 2

I know a few of the developers on the Carleton University developed Blindside Project. They are actively developing an open-source web conferencing and presentation tool for e-learning, with the intent of eventually offering university courses online.

It's pretty fully featured software, and is meant to be installed as a server that can host many conference rooms at a time. It has voice, video, text, and a whiteboard/slideshow (Edit: supports PDF at the moment) capability. One feature I think it neat is that students can 'raise their hands' in the class to ask the instructor a question, where they can take the floor for a moment.

Check out the demo on the site (if it's not working anymore I'll nudge the developers). Another pro is that the clients only need to have flash installed.

I just logged onto the online demo and created this preview:

This project is now called BigBlueButton : http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/

Here is the demo: http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

Answer 3

I have used DimDim a few times as part of an educational project.

You can use it as part of a hosted service from DimDim themselves, and also has an open source version that you can download and run yourself.

I have not used it in the last six months or so, but we did find it very useful for collaborating in a multimedia-style classroom, but like all media streaming, does require a decent broadband connection both on the server and client end.

One further issue we discovered with it was that to avoid a lot of messy firewall issues (especially at educational institutions) you need to run it on its own machine on port 80, so if it is running in collaboration with another website (such as Moodle), you need a separate machine for DimDim and for Moodle.

So far, to avoid a lot of technical issues that existed a year ago (but have probably been resolved), the project I was working on went with a hosted service at the time, but it is expected that it will end up running its own versions for control and cost reasons.

Answer 4

I do not have personal experience with this product, but dokeos is recommended by several people on other sites.

Answer 5

@adeel - I think this blog entry can give you some details at least about one user that has tried DimDim.

Answer 6

We have used Dimdim in our company. Pretty easy to install on Windows (as they say one-click; it is really one-click).

We have used in LAN environment. We didn't have any issues as long as we were using only audio. With video we faced lot of issues, do we didn't use it (but it might be probably us). I think dimdim supports only 3 users to have a microphone enabled at a time. But when we used this feature and switched the audio to different people, often it resulted in problems (like audit lost completely for everyone etc).

Hope this is helpful.

Answer 7

Although it's not what you're looking for, Moodle might be of use to you if you're looking into having online courses.

Answer 8

You can try chamilo is open source LMS with social network features, it's a fork of Dokeos.