Comparisons
From Dokeos
Dokeos is a good product, but there's no shame in admitting it's not perfect. We are better in many ways than some of the "competition", but we can also learn from their strengths. In this page we can list things that we like from other platforms (both proprietary and free software ones).
Contents |
Blackboard
Like
- Blackboard is userfriendly for students (but see Talk:Comparisons for a disagreement).
- It has very consistent behaviour from tool to tool.
Dislike
- It is not free software
- A bit more mouseclicks to achieve anything
- Blackboard suffers a bit from having a "corporatesque" feeling.
- The teacher interface is strangely complicated (compare this with our teacher view / student view switch!).
- Their multi-language versions lag behind the American English one.
- It uses frames everywhere, which is not good from a web dev / standards point of view.
Claroline
Dislike
- Seems not to follow open source development methodology as much as we do: no open meetings, no meeting minutes, no public roadmap... development seems slower too, that's probably no coincidence.
- Messages about Dokeos are deleted from their forum.
- Many tools seem no different than before the code split.
- Code libraries not as clean as the Dokeos API
- requires register_globals = on in php.ini
Like
They have two branches in the CVS: one for stable, one for experimental releases. We were a little late with this, we'll split in two branches at about April 30th / May 1st 2005. Their group document and normal document code has been combined, that's a nice achievement.
Moodle
Moodle seems like a good, well-developed product. It has a different vision for itself:
WebCT
The big disadvantage of WebCT is its lack of userfriendliness. It has a confusing interface that looks very complex. This means it's certainly not better in terms of our vision of a light, flexible, userfriendly software. Perhaps it has interesting features Dokeos does not have. Their "vista" product is very big, and probably the most expensive of all elearning platforms.
Ganesha
Ganesha is "only" a SCORM viewer, it's necessary to have a special SCORM software to create contents in Ganesha. With Dokeos, it's possible to create the course's content with your web browser.
