More and more high schools are embracing online courses to reach more students and all times of the day. While you can spend a lot of money for online course software, you don't have to. Here are seven free platforms for teaching online courses.
This list cannot begin without mentioning Moodle first. Moodle is an free platform that is commonly referred to as a course management system or virtual learning environment. To use Moodle you have to either install it on your own server(s) or have someone host it for you. If you don't have a server of your own, a quick Google search for "Moodle hosting" will lead you to plenty of companies that will host Moodle for you. To learn more about Moodle watch the video introduction below.
Claroline is an open source program that gives users the freedom to create their own online classroom. Using Claroline teachers can produce assessment activities, post and collect assignments, build a wiki, monitor student activities, and create chat rooms or discussion forums. Claroline is available as a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. Claroline is not a hosted service so you do need to have someone host your installation of Claroline. You can, however, demo Claroline online here.
Udemy is a new free platform for teaching courses online. Anyone can sign-up for Udemy and start creating courses in minutes. Udemy offers a variety of tools for delivering content online. Course creators can publish slideshows, publish videos, and create mash-ups of slideshows and videos synched together. Course creators can also hold live online sessions through Udemy's virtual classroom platform. Watch the video below to learn more about Udemy. 
RCampus is a free, web-based, platform for creating and conducting courses online. Using RCampus teachers can create a course, collect students' assignments, and maintain a gradebook. RCampus provides all of the tools you would expect to find in an online course management system. Through RCampus you can post assignments, host discussion forums, post videos, post images, post links, collect assignments, and manage a gradebook. Watch the video below to learn more about RCampus.
Peer 2 Peer University 2010 from P2P University on Vimeo.
8 comments:
I have another suggestion for an online course management system. It's called Haiku LMS (www.haikulearning.com) and it does many of the same things listed above. My favorite thing about it is that it's amazingly simple to use. It leads you step-by-step through things, and has a TON of cool things you can embed within the course including Voicethread, Google Earth, Voki, etc. Not only that, but it has beautiful design templates to use (while so many other platforms have really clunky, ugly templates.) It's entirely web-based (no hosting necessary) and free to develop as many courses as you want, but only free to have one active class at a time (which is fine for most people who are still teaching regular classes as well). It works well for any level, but it is designed for the K-12 environment. Just thought you might want to know about some other platforms! (And no, they don't pay me, I just really like their product! :-))
It looks like Blackboard is now offering a free LMS as well with up to 5 classes per teacher: http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/02/10/blackboard-launches-free-webbased-course-platform.aspx
OK, I know Blackboard is universally loathed, but they do have free: https://www.coursesites.com/webapps/Bb-sites-course-creation-BBLEARN/pages/index.html
The best VLE by far that I've used is called Edu2.0. It's completely free and has incredible support from it's admins. It's hosted and maintained on their servers and I've been using it for three years without fail.
http://www.edu20.org/
Another: http://edu20.org
I have been using www.edu20.org. It has all that the above offer and much more. Why not check it out, it's free...
Instructure Canvas just came out:
http://www.instructure.com/
Looks interesting.
Also: Curatr and Instructure Canvas
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