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by abdullahkhalids 978 days ago
I am part of a volunteer org that runs dozens of week-long online workshops every year, with total thousands of students. Currently, we use Canvas. While Canvas the software is great, though overkill for our needs, self-hosting is very difficult.

To convert to a lighter, fresh alternative, we need the following features

- Easy onboarding of new users. On Canvas, instructors add students by email to the course, and the students get an invite in the email.

- Easy to add a variety of question types of quizzes. Native latex support is mandatory (should be able to write $E=mc^2$ in any text box, and it should render).

- Controls on user progress through the course. "If you score at least 50% on Assignment 1, then assignment 2 is unlocked for you."

- Easy to export data.

- Most importantly, an API for accessing student assignment submissions and setting their grades (We have coding assignments that are graded automatically with our own custom codebase). You will need this anyway, if you want any sort of extension support for your platform.

- Fast. I don't care about fancy transitions. Canvas is quite slow, often painfully slow and we want to move away from that.

2 comments

Agreed. We run a self-hosted Canvas LMS as well as Moodle LMS in our University. On Canvas Open Source, We don't have access to the new quizzes, new analytics, RCE text area, and a host of other 'new features'.

We are always on the lookout for new LMS.

Canvas is okay (speed is a concern) but some things are very counter-intuitive. Like matching quiz questions to competencies/outcomes/standards. Also assignments.

Moodle has a hundred different settings for anything - so people get confused and standardisation is hard.

I agree with @Abdullahkalids

- Easy onboarding of new users. On Canvas, instructors add students by email to the course, and the students get an invite in the email.

And that is.. bad? Because it does sound tedious for the teacher. Also how do you feel about importing CSVs?

The Canvas process is documented here [1]. You can copy paste the name+email columns from an excel/googledoc/csv file into the textbox and it will work. It is not tedious at all.

Obviously, direct upload of excel/csv would work just as well or better, if they were clever enough to pick out the name and email columns from the others.

[1] https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I...