[royal__]

Homegrown systems are expensive to maintain and usually still fail to match up to the commercial options available at this point. LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software. I worked on my university's own version as an undergrad.

[walrus01]

There is no need to reinvent any wheels by making a homegrown LMS. Moodle exists and is completely open source. Lots of large institutions use it. Even in the case that you need to do something really weird with it that isn't solved by one of the many plugins that exist, you're already 90% of the way there with its base platform, and only 10% remaining for DIY software development.

[senkora]

Canvas is actually also open source and can be self-hosted: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

(I don't have experience in hosting either software so I can't really comment beyond that)

[bearjaws]

Moodle also scales to pretty large schools, I work on an instance that is over 27k students. Integrates with pretty much every platform, authentication, etc.

And it's pretty easy to customize which is nice.

Throw it in an auto-scale ECS cluster and you have something that goes from 100 students to 20k easy.

[ryukoposting]

My university (a very large state school) transitioned from Moodle to Canvas while I was a student (2016-2020). They transitioned because Moodle sucked. Profs hated it, students hated it more. Basic things were difficult to find.

A lot can change in 10 years, sure. Maybe Moodle is better now (I doubt it). I'm all for self-hosting a LMS. But, can we at least self-host a good one?

[jazzyjackson]

> LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software

it's MIT.

[_diyar]

But it’s not like MIT gains anything from rolling their own LMS.

[cactusfrog]

I went to a small liberal arts school where the IT department recruited CS students under work study to build the systems. It’s a good learning experience for students to be involved in constructing and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the university running. I don’t mean this entirely as in cost savings, but because I like the idea of a university being self maintained.

[_diyar]

It’s a great system until every department is angry at the one for messing up the system.

As a system provider you take responsibility not only for maintenance, but also to tank the blame once something invariably goes wrong

[jcgl]

You don’t need to roll your own LMS—you can self-host Canvas: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Production-St...

[Xeronate]

Maintaining an LMS doesn't seem like a good use of time. You should almost always outsource pieces that aren't your core business.

[SoftTalker]

It's a university. Teaching and learning is their core business.

[Xeronate]

LMS doesn't improve teaching or learning. They are administrative overhead.

[dnnddidiej]

Computer science != software engineering.

[j_w]

The university I went to established has a rule that was essentially "student made software is not permitted to be used." Professors couldn't actually use student made software, the software had to be wrapped up by a "company" and a contract made. This meant that you couldn't just make a tool/utility/whatever and have it be used.

I believe the same applied to the professors themselves, although that was hardly enforced.

[synack]

Sounds like an opportunity for the business school to do a seminar on forming an LLC and writing contracts.

[kccqzy]

Imagine this rule back in the 70s. We wouldn’t even have Berkeley Software Distribution.

[Jaxan]

I think the current situation shows that outsourcing is also expensive. The costs are just different or not always clear up front.

[deathanatos]

… so?

My highschool, for a while, had a website, which was eventually replaces by a large corporate CMS. Was the website as complicated or complex as the CMS? No, you would have needed to know HTML to publish to it. The CMS was no doubt "more user friendly", I suppose.

But … the original site had a soul. It was unique to the school. There was a student directory! All lost, because the CMS meant utter standardization between all the schools using it (their pages were all identical, except for each got like a different picture of the school as the banner at the top) and the CMS did not do directory anything.

Of course, the directory largely didn't matter in the end. (This was when you needed people's landlines! Quite laughable nowadays…) But it was still sad to see it lost, and several of us students worked on it, which provided us with some early real-world experience.

A large number of my college professors published their own sites, too, where they'd put their lecture notes, homework, etc. I loved those far more than I loved "Canvas" or whatever the ugly LMS we used was.