The online Learning Management System space is set to grow massively over the coming years as more and more education takes place on the web. Nuvvo launched a few days ago with an interesting service in this market.
Nuvvo, which is free, allows educators to create courses with an great Ajax interface (watching the tour makes me realize how useful Ajax can be with applications like this). There are also modules to assist with charging students for the course (if the educator chooses to charge), create tests, grade, etc. The hard work goes into creating the content, not figuring out how to use Nuvvo.
Current courses are listed here. Nuvvo makes money from ads and by taking 8% of any course fees set by the educator.
Since 2000, Moodle has been a popular open source choice in this space. However, Moodle requires a server installation whereas Nuvvo is a web application. Moodle also generally requires more techical expertise, while Nuvvo does a lot more hand-holding. A Nuvvo executive prepared a comparison chart of the two solutions with additional information.
What I haven’t been able to do is review an actual course, which requires an application.
Nuvvo may find some adherents in the independent educator community, but by and large institutions prefer to host their own stuff, not least because they can then tailor it to fit with their authentication solutions and existing systems. This is why Moodle is attracting so much attention – it’s arguably better at doing what it does than WebCT and Blackboard, the paid entrants in this arena, while being both free and more easily customisable. A separate project to get Moodle to talk to Elgg will also bring the advantages of weblogging, social networking and individual-based Internet services.
8% of any course fees is also an absolutely massive stumbling block. That’s a huge percentage!
NUVVO is interesting ..but its pricing is exorbitant…there is one more open source e-learning web application http://www.claroline.net/ which is promising and much better than moodle.
Oops… apologies to TechCrunch and its readers for letting a draft with some typos ping you. You can see the published version by heading to the Nuvvo Blog.
Also wanted to mention that Nuvvo is suitable for individual instructors, but that we have some enterprise solutions already in place and also some exciting enterprise announcements in the pipeline. We think you’re going to love what comes next…
I’ve always thought services like this would be great for developing countries. With the proliferation of wireless in remote places in rural areas of India and Africa for instance, internet access is spreading to the third world without the overhead of massive investments in old and cumbersome technology. Services like this, considering the exponential growth of internet access in the third world, will provide interesting ways to bridge the educational gap that exists between first world countries and the developing countries which have yet to even experience an industrial revolution! I hope to see more of these types of services flourish, not only because of the commercial possibilies which are apparent… but also because of the social ramifications.
If 8 percent is exorbitant, then individual teachers are within their rights to create their own websites, own LMS, and market it all themselves.
A cut of eight doesn’t seem that outlandish to me (especially since the product is free for people that want to teach for free).
I haven’t used Claroline, but according to the website -
“Claroline is a free application based on PHP /MySQL allowing teachers or education organizations to create and administrate courses through the web.”
PHP/MySQL? The whole point of Nuvvo is that it’s easy to use – and people can choose to pay for the user-friendliness if they choose.
At least Nuvvo didn’t spare the FUD while writing their comparison with Moodle:
“Moodle is built using the popular PHP technology. PHP is a ’scripting’ language that facilitates rapid application development by being relatively simple for programmers to work with. Unforunately, you trade simplicity for stability and performance: PHP and similar scripting languages have drastically less overall performance (response time, throughput, scalability) of their ‘compiled’ counterparts such as Java and .NET ….”
There are strong enough arguments on both sides of this issue that Nuvvo would have been better served to just leave it out.
As Gabe mentioned above Nuvvo will appeal to independent educators who have value to offer but are put off by the obstacle of having to host,upgrade, secure and manage their own moddle or caroline environments.
This same formula has already been used successfully in areas ranging from CRM ( Salesforce ) to project management ( Basecamp ) where good enough is ok for a large portion of the market and those that want more functionality can opt for an enterprise license or hire their own admins/developers and install moodle etc.
One of the points that many people seem to miss when discussing open sources vs hosted servies is the speed at which shared services can update, bug fix and innovate for one single, controlled environment than having to cater for a number of different install bases aas is the case for installed software ( open or closed source)
Personally I think it’s great to see more innovation in this space, now if the source was also open …. ok, so I can’t always have my cake and eat it
FYI – your RSS feed currently shows a ghost headline called “Hugh Nailed It”.
I can’t really say anything about Nuvvo, but I have had the opportunity to use Moodle at the University of Alberta. I think the application could be useful, but unfortunately the people in charge (sys admins or whoever) chose not to enable all of the available modules – no RSS feeds for example!
If my experience is any indication, any problems with “Education 2.0″ will not be with the technology, but with the institutions and instructors themselves.
I thought I’d comment about Nuvvo on my blog rather than in the comments here – http://tim.blog...17/1682144.html
@Vikram
Notice an interesting argument regarding where claroline fails and about Krawler[x] – a p2p 2.0 LMS: http://jayajha....s-and-products/
Shashark
It’s an interesting approach, and AJAX is impressive, but the comparison article is misleading on at least two counts. Firstly Moodle does scale, eg the UK Open University is moving all 180,000 of its students over to Moodle as the institutional VLE, and secondly it’s not difficult to set up a secure server for Moodle – we’re a 150 strong primary aged school and we’ve had no problems with Moodle in-house, and there are plenty of folk happy to provide Moodle hosting otherwise, for a flat fee rather than a % of the revenue.
Also, Moodle is far richer in terms of resource support and activities: an integrated wiki, collaborative glossaries and synchronous discussion (chat) are obvious examples.
More importantly, Moodle is open-source and thus institutions and/or teachers have complete control not only of the content of the environment but its structure and features too. The gentle learning curve presented by php and the well documented moodle code means that it’s fairly easy for teachers to start adding their own blocks, modules and themes to a moodle install, and then, if they wish, to feed these back to the community. With nuvvo, you take what you’re given.
It’s hardly a new idea — metacollege.com had a similar idea back in 2000 (see link below). I suspect it will have a similar shelf life.
Sorry, here’s the link:
http://web.arch...ome/aboutus.htm
That FUD about “scripting” languages not scaling is patently absurd and has been debunked more times than I care to count. I have dozens of friends that are teachers, and you can rest assured I won’t be recommending Nuvvo to them.
What is this 8% of any course fees set by the educator? According to the Nuvvo site, there is a free version for free courses. If you want to charge for your course, you join one of the paid options — $9.99/month or $34.99/month. You keep all the income from the course fees, AND you can use Google AdSense to earn income from the ads on your site. There are bugs, to be sure, and some improvements are needed to make this a seamless process, but what is not to like about these terms? If you think 8% is extortionate, look at Universal Class that takes 40%! Now that’s extortionate!
I have been using nuvvo in my classes for free and loving it. This is an unbelievable resource for teachers. I have my senior students develop elearning courses for younger students on concepts that these students have difficulty learning…in fact some of my students didn’t learn these concepts very well when they were younger. So double the learning.
As I said my students are enjoying and really learning from the experience. There interest in math has increased and their interest in my elearning courses have helped to strengthen their understand of math and the value of on line learning.
I am writing to ask all of you who are interested in getting students more ICT literate to have a look at Nuvvo and spread the word. Iit really is fantastic.
I think that there is a real place for this product with in the enterprise. Outside of the quick to love you – quick to forget you web 2.0 crowd. I know that this won’t be the last project from the married-inc crew.
I am going to suggest a higher education organization buys it for thier distance ed stuff.
cheers
scott
The business model was inappropriate and it was focused around the wrong crowd. http://www.courseoutlet.com is coming up with a better and brilliant idea.
Well, there are other alternatives. Sites like http://www.click-a-teacher.com give users the best of both worlds; a web-based application and a great product-Moodle. It just launched, but the software has a strong following already, so it shouldn’t take long to grow.
Just heard of another one from Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast on http://www.twit.tv/itn35. It’s http://www.digication.com. According to their website, over 200 schools have signed up in the first two months of launch…
That\’s the only reason why people don\’t talk about it.