Congratulations, I'm very excited to take a look. A few questions:
1) Instructure Canvas is another open-core (AGPL) LMS with a billion dollar market cap company backing it. It has tons of features and users. Why build another AGPL LMS? Is it solely because their Rails tech stack is terrible?
2) Do you want other institutions and orgs to develop alongside you? The use of AGPL says no, you want to focus on cloud hosting. Why not build an MIT-licensed LMS to differentiate yourself?
3) Every LMS seems to suffer from feature bloat. Instructors come up with insane feature requests and pretty soon your gradebook supports 3 different types of grading, with points or percentages, dropping the lowest 3 of 7 grades in a weighted category. Do you go down this road of developing features for your power users like every other LMS? If not, how do you avoid it? I see you're already interested in SCORM (an abandoned standard from 30 years ago). How do you avoid chasing every standard, every package, every power user feature request?
1. Canvas is not really open source. It was open source a long time ago, but now it is open-code really.
Instructure was taken over by a Hedge Fund and since then, all the new developments are not part of the Open Source. The open source is a bit crippled now.
None of the new features such as the New Quizzes (yes, its called that), New RCE Text Area, New Analytics, etc etc are not available on the Open Source Version.
So yes, the Billion dollar market is desperate for a new true AGPL LMS.
And it is time for one to disrupt the market.
2. Good Question.
3. Flexibility in grading and marks is really, really, really important. Because the systems, curriculum, standards are not flexible. Even with a University or College, different programs have different grading standards. It is not an option not to support the different types of grading unless the education system itself changes. If you can't support the diversity out there, you quickly risk becoming obsolete even before you start.
Yep, it is LTI time now. Not SCORM or even xAPI, TinCan, etc.
SCORM 1.2 then SCORM 2004 then TinCan and IMS Common Cartridge and IMS Content Packaging
As an LMS developer, how do you avoid the insanity of building to all of these standards and listening to what your next power user asks for? E.g., there is an instructor out there that has been using the same SCORM 1.2 package from 20 years ago and wants your new LMS to support it.
1) Instructure Canvas is another open-core (AGPL) LMS with a billion dollar market cap company backing it. It has tons of features and users. Why build another AGPL LMS? Is it solely because their Rails tech stack is terrible?
2) Do you want other institutions and orgs to develop alongside you? The use of AGPL says no, you want to focus on cloud hosting. Why not build an MIT-licensed LMS to differentiate yourself?
3) Every LMS seems to suffer from feature bloat. Instructors come up with insane feature requests and pretty soon your gradebook supports 3 different types of grading, with points or percentages, dropping the lowest 3 of 7 grades in a weighted category. Do you go down this road of developing features for your power users like every other LMS? If not, how do you avoid it? I see you're already interested in SCORM (an abandoned standard from 30 years ago). How do you avoid chasing every standard, every package, every power user feature request?