Free or Open Source Collaboration/eLearning Software

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

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

Answer 2

Did some googling and DimDim came up as a solution. Does anyone have any experience with this that they could share?

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

The BlindSide site also listed these other projects:

• ePresence
• OpenMeetings
• DimDim
• WebHuddle

All opensource as well.

Answer 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

There are many free eLearning tools for you to create collaboration learning. Moodle would be a good yet open office tool for you. Also, you could view this article, it list many free tools for you. Top E-Learning Tools of 2009 You Shouldn‘t Teach Without

Answer 9

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