[noobermin]

It honestly would be great for some competition, FOSS or not in the distance learning department. Blackboard and friends are horrendous, and as we know zoom has myriad problems. For a small group meeting I have each week that is now online, I've started using jitsi too.

[synergetic]

Agreed. Moodle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle) is a solid FOSS alternative to BB and is widely used among UK universities.

[enjoyyourlife]

Canvas (https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms) is open-source

[remexre]

This actually surprises me, with how cruddy it is, I assumed it was proprietary... My uni switched to canvas from Moodle, to the general detriment of anyone without fast internet and a fast PC.

[servilio]

Do you know if they are using the a hosted version or hosting it themselves?

[saagarjha]

I brought this up once and a couple of university employees were quick to mention that features that actually let them use it at scale cost a bunch of money and there were fairly large support costs even for open source solutions.

[bransonf]

Blackboard has some really shady IP practices as well. In 2006 they got a patent essentially for LMS (learning management systems) in general and immediately sued a competitor.

Not only that, I’ve discovered some minor exploits in my time using it. For what it is, it’s horrible software and none of my professors were ever happy to use it.

[eulenteufel]

My universities computer science, physics and math departments use Sakai [1] instead of the university blackboard and I quiet like it. It's FOSS and works well on mobile (in contrast to the universities blackboard system)

[1] https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai

[danhor]

My University uses ilias and in my experience it's way better than moodle, but I haven't used BB. Although I haven't seen any glaring issues in the english translations, it seems to be primarily targeting german audiences. https://github.com/ILIAS-eLearning/ILIAS

[e12e]

Is there any life left in .lrn?

Based on the ancient aolserver?

https://dotlrn.org/