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by protomyth 2109 days ago
Classroom is also is very difficult for less-privileged students to use - speaking as someone who used to rely on a 4 GB of RAM netbook with a Pentium and was still using it for part of this quarantine, even with Linux things really get slow.

We went with Moodle because it was easier to setup and maintain. It also is much less stressful on the client computer. If you read the Canvas install, its pretty much another group who advertises open source but then has an installation procedure that truly sucks. Canvas wants you to pay for hosting. Moodle is super easy by comparison.

2 comments

Mine went with Moodle and BigBlueButton, in my personal experience as a student and a teacher it's much better than WebEx, MS Teams, Fleep, Zoom (or similar) combined with Canvas, Google Classroom (or similar).
We went with Zoom because of peer-pressure. We tried a different vendor for video conferencing, but well, there is a lot of pressure to use zoom. I'm not real impressed, but they are basically the Windows of video conferencing.
I've worked with Canvas a bunch and concluded that they really don't care about open source. Maybe they did at one point when they were the underdog and it gave them an interesting edge. But now they will provide no support to help you run it yourself. The wiki pages outlining how to deploy are community-maintained and pretty frequently out of date. They're attempting to replace pieces (analytics and quizzing) with closed-source standalone applications.
You honestly can see the difference when a company gives a crap. For example, look at SpiceWorks in the ticket software area. Their directions are clear and easy. Heck, they have VM images.