Low-fi Learning Management System?

Being on the student council, I want to make a website for my high school. The website basically should allow the students to select the courses they are attending from a list of courses. For each course, the following features are needed: - Teachers should be able to list assignments, deadlines and tests. - Teachers should be able to upload files or link to resources - Teachers should be able to send out reminders to all students subscribed to a course, that will be sent out in the form of messages on the site or emails.

Now for each student, it should display a calendar that lists his upcoming events and deadlines. He should also be able to set an option to get automatic reminders for upcoming events.

Most of the E-learning systems I have tried out are overly complicated, with the ability to have the entire course material online, and SCORM compatibility, and payment for courses and what not. They are too highly functional, but make basic tasks tough, and also look ugly as crap. Meanwhile, generic CMS's are too generic, and although all the tasks I want to achieve could be achieved through them, they are not meant for the job and would probably also add a lot of overhead right? Although if nothing else works out, I might have to settle for Joomla or Drupal...

Is there any simpler application that can help me speed up the process of developing this site? Like I don't want to re-invent the wheel in creating the calendar and reminder system, theres gotta be some way I can reuse already-written code, right? Any suggestions?

I kind of hate Moodle right now. Its ugly as hell, not the most configurable app in the world, and has very poor community participation and documentation IMHO.I found eFront to be better, and learnt that there are in fact a lot of other less popuular LMS's out there. However, there aren't many reviews or comparisions, and so I don't know which ones to try out. As for Drupal, see the comment to the answer below.

2009-10-30 13:54:47

I was kind of hoping not to use such a generic system, but something geared more specifically towards education. Since Drupal is more oriented towards static content like blog posts and news reports than a communication portal, I don't think Drupal will fit very well. If you've seen Notely.net, that's exactly what I want for our school.

2009-10-30 14:00:41

And I do have some experience with Drupal, and was thinking about using Organic groups for courses. As I exhaust all other solutions, Drupal is becoming more and more of an attractive solution. But isn't there any way I can cobble together components for reminders and calendars and stuff and code the rest myself?

2009-10-30 14:08:58

Of course coding your own modules is an option - from what I've read, writing your own Drupal Modules isn't difficult, and you *would* get exactly what you want. Downside is the effort - using/configuring a module can be a lot faster than writing your own code.

Bevan 2009-10-30 22:44:30

While Drupal *is* very good at static content, that's not the limit. Check out the title of the homepage for http://www.drupal.org: "Drupal - Community Plumbing". There's a lot of stuff in Drupal explicitly oriented at communities of people wanting/needing to work together.

Bevan 2009-10-30 22:48:14

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Low-fi Learning Management System?

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