A nice place to set up class online.
June 28, 2010 10:15 AM   Subscribe

I have some content/ideas and would like to develop my own online course from them. I want to focus on making the best possible content for my audience, so I want to spend my time on that part by using a platform service that will allow me to develop and host my course online without much web development of my own.

I have experience adminstering Wordpress and Drupal sites and have online community management experience. What I don't have is web development knowledge and my own server space. So I am looking for a hosted solution that will allow me to focus on content and execution and provide a nice online experience for a not very web savvy potential market.

Requirements...

Need the option to have free and paid content on my site
I would like to have the ability to interact with students in a forum The ability for students to share examples, discuss them, and interact with me in a forum.
A facility for presenting "lectures" -- 5-15 slides followed by a short quiz which could unlock the next topic, etc.
Would like the ability embed video
The ability to develop online tests and polls
I don't want my student to have to use markup, which would make most wikis problematic.
Needs to look like one seamless simple website to the user
My audience will likely be not very web savvy. Needs to be usable by the average Facebook user.

Of course, free would be best, but willing to pay especially for a great user experience. Keep in mind I am an individual startup, not MegaEduCorp. What I was hoping was to find a free site and then pay extra to turn off the ads.

What kinds of educational courseware and services are out there for folks like me who want to develop classes and teach them, but not necessarily develop web software?
posted by cross_impact to Education (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I've worked as a course management software developer and designer for most of my career. The answer to your question, unfortunately, is "not much".

Most course management software is AFAIK basically not available for individual online courses; pretty much everybody in that space wants to sell their software to a whole university or school district at a time; there are a lot of reasons for this, but it boils down to there's more money in that than in marketing to individual teachers.

I'm not aware of any free hosted course management systems. If you're willing to acquire your own server space, Moodle is probably what you want to be looking at. I don't have a tremendous amount of direct experience with it, so I don't know whether it can handle all of the features you're looking for without modification, but if you're able to administer wordpress or drupal, moodle shouldn't be too difficult to handle.
posted by ook at 11:25 AM on June 28, 2010


Response by poster: I was hoping for more options, but Moodle indeed looks promising. Thanks!
posted by cross_impact at 11:19 AM on June 30, 2010


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