VLE

[tcaceres]

What is the best free vle for schools?

[paulkerton]

What is the best free vle for schools?

Oh well now that's a question and a half!

 

Primary or Secondary?

VLE or LMS?

Hosted or self-hosted?

Completely free, or freemium?

Gratis or Libre?

Edited June 24, 2020 by paulkerton

[Roberto]

What is the best free vle for schools?

 

One that meets the need of the staff, pupils (and potentially, parents) of the school in question, along with the budgetary and governance needs of said school. As that changes from place to place, there isn't a simple answer.

[supportman]

Sharepoint + Teams

[mavhc]

First question is: What's a VLE? What do you want to do?

[tcaceres]

secondary

vle

self hosted

completely free

[paulkerton]

secondary

vle

self hosted

completely free

 

Moodle

[tcaceres]

Are there alternatives to this as we have tried it but the download didn't work?

[Roberto]

Are there alternatives to this as we have tried it but the download didn't work?

 

Moodle works and downloads just fine. There are over 4000 sites in the UK alone using it and I've just downloaded it now. I'd rather extract my own teeth than manage Moodle personally, but it *does* work.

[paulkerton]

I'd rather extract my own teeth than manage Moodle personally, but it *does* work.

 

Here, here.

It works, but it's quite the rodeo to get it running.

[tcaceres]

It says that the site can't provide a secure connection

[paulkerton]

It says that the site can't provide a secure connection

That's an issue with your connection, not Moodle.

Downloads just fine from here: https://download.moodle.org/download.php/stable39/moodle-3.9.zip

[Chaniel]

I feel like the problem there is on your end.

 

Personally I think Google Classroom is pretty spot on if you're a G Suite school. It has a lot of things that could be better from an administrative perspective, but it does the job and is easy for staff to upload documents etc.

[jmak]

When you're defining the business case, be careful with what "free" means.

Having server processing resources and data storage on site is not free.

 

Giving IT staff time to learn how to implement a system they've never used before and then manage it is not free - also bear in mind that training staff to install and manage Windows is likely to be good value as you'll need them to do it again. Designing and implementing a VLE is something they'll probably do once.

 

Administrating and running the VLE takes someone's time which is not free.

 

The benefit and weakness of Moodle is that it can be configured in an almost endless number of different ways. If you don't know what it can do and the teaching staff don't have a very clear list of requirements of suggest it's unlikely to be a successful deployment.

 

You may have the answers to these questions and there are some well designed and used VLEs, but a lot of us have seen very expensive (either in time or money) systems that the teaching staff don't really buy in to leading to lots of wasted IT support time and frustration.

 

I'd *really* recommend a long look at either MS Office 365 with Teams, SharePoint etc or GSuite. They do a lot of what most schools want from a VLE (at least to get started) have no monetary cost, there's loads of support (lots of people on here for a start and plenty of places for teachers to turn to that aren't you!) and there's a £2k grant available to have an expert help you set up at the minute.

[paulkerton]

I'd *really* recommend a long look at either MS Office 365 with Teams, SharePoint etc or GSuite. They do a lot of what most schools want from a VLE (at least to get started) have no monetary cost, there's loads of support (lots of people on here for a start and plenty of places for teachers to turn to that aren't you!) and there's a £2k grant available to have an expert help you set up at the minute.

 

More on that here : https://schoolleaders.thekeysupport.com/covid-19/deliver-remote-learning/make-tech-work-you/

[GREED]

The 'completely free' bit is the red flag here. You will not get any decent solution that is 'totally free, forever' that is supported, both while whoever is managing it is employed by the organisation and after they leave, that is scaleable and reliable. Those things need money. MS/Google are an exception, but ultimately need investment in staff setting up, managing and maintaining.

 

VLEs die on their bottoms when no one is looking after it, the content, championing it's use throughout the school. There will be money needed to pay for this time, it isn't the sort of thing a DHT can just play with and set up ready for all remote learners over a weekend.

[dhicks]

self hosted

 

"Self hosted" doesn't have to mean run locally on a physical machine in your school building these days, Moodle should run on a hosted server for under £20 a month. There are also third-party companies that offer support and setup for Moodle, I don't know if any of those are eligable for any part of the £2,000 grant available for VLE setups at the moment.

 

Otherwise, if you're choosing between O365 and GSuite, I'd go for GSuite, just because there tends to be better support on third-party education-related resource sites for Google OAuth logins - not everything has to be hosted within your VLE, but a seemless link between a VLE resources page and whereever the resource is you want pupils to use saves a lot of admin overhead.

[jthompson]

Yeah, I think you basically need to have to looked at MS Teams/SharePoint and Google Classroom and have really good reasons to not use either of those before you decide to go with anything else. Out of the two, Google Classroom is the one built specifically for schools and is least likely to scare the unitiated end user (IMHO).

 

The security and service reliability that MS and Google can offer will dwarf anything that you can do in house. Also, with so many school using them, new staff may not even need training if they're coming in with prior experience.

[Ditto]

Most of the salient points have been made already. I'd agree with go down the "Microsoft or G Suite route" - personally I'd plump for G Suite, but it can depend on your current setup - do you have a Windows domain currently with users (staff/pupils)? Although not free, better value for money would be to use someone like Salamander or Haptic Networks (other providers are available) to get you up and running. You absolutely need to have the SLT 100% on board and committed whichever way you go. Try to find some reference schools for MS and G Suite. As others have pointed out, don't be over focused on the free - free today can mean expense tomorrow.

[mavhc]

Google and Microsoft will continue to move between offering their lock in product for free to gain marketshare to pivot to their other products, and charging for extra things that you'll need more and more, you have no control over what they'll do, and it'll be harder to switch the more you use it.

 

That said doing online learning is such a shallow learning curve (not steep, that makes no sense, everyone is saying it wrong), that unless it's really easy and deployed well with pilots, training, and support from all areas, it'll fail. So pick whatever's easiest to use.

[tcaceres]

Is there a free hosted LMS for secondary schools?

[paulkerton]

Is there a free hosted LMS for secondary schools?

 

Short answer, is no.

Long answer is that there are some free solutions out there, but they've either got complications (Freemium and owned by Mainland Chinese business like Edmodo) or they're not a true LMS (Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams)

So, it all depends on what you want your LMS to do and to be.

[RootsSchImp]

When you're defining the business case, be careful with what "free" means.

Having server processing resources and data storage on site is not free.

 

Giving IT staff time to learn how to implement a system they've never used before and then manage it is not free - also bear in mind that training staff to install and manage Windows is likely to be good value as you'll need them to do it again. Designing and implementing a VLE is something they'll probably do once.

 

Administrating and running the VLE takes someone's time which is not free.

 

These are excellent points, I've worked with schools that set up their own byzantine processes in order to 'save money' on software - then end up hiring more staff to handle the workload!

[DrBeaker]

These are excellent points, I've worked with schools that set up their own byzantine processes in order to 'save money' on software - then end up hiring more staff to handle the workload!

Yep. I've seen this quote often too. Especially with home-brew type systems developed in-house, then that person who developed it leaves and no-one maintains it or knows how to. That's the risk with these type of systems.

[mavhc]

If software isn't making things faster the software needs to change, that's the whole point of computers, to automate things