Whilst Moodle continues to dominate as the open source LMS of choice, we have been taking a look at an alternative open source solution. We were impressed by the simplicity, reporting and virtual classroom functionality of Dokeos.

We know many of you prefer show me to tell me. So, if you just want to dive straight in and see a Dokeos site that we set up go to:

http://kineoopensource.dokeos.com

You can self-register and see what we were able to set up in just a few hours with Dokeos. If you want to hear a little more about Dokeos and its potential advantages over Moodle read on.

There are a number of open source LMS solutions available in the market including Moodle, which we have implemented for many of our clients. Always keen to explore new tools and technologies we have been having a look at Dokeos and where it scores over Moodle.

Dokeos is used in over 6,000 installations in 60 countries, serving 1.3million users and 122,000 courses. The largest known installation serves 29,000 users at Ghent University in Belgium, a country where it is widely adopted. Dokeos is in use at the Belgian ministries of Health, Defence, Internal Affairs, Unemployed Services and Federal Police.

Dokeos calls itself as an ‘open source professional learning suite’. This comprises three core products: learning management system, rapid learning authoring tool and videoconferencing tool.

The system is SCORM compliant allowing you to import Articulate, Auralog, Captivate, Lectora, Skillsoft and any other type of SCORM content, and supports SCORM sequencing.

The Dokeos set up is a little more structured than Moodle.In terms of ease of use it is easy to get started and it is very straightforward to create courses and to choose what learning resources you want to make available. Dokeos also looks better out of the box, but it is more basic and doesn’t have the almost endless configuration possibilities that Moodle boasts.

We found the quiz and survey tools easier to use than Moodle and the reporting particularly good by comparison. See an example below.

You can create basic content with Dokeos using its authoring tool - Oogie Rapid Learning. This is a Powerpoint to SCORM e-learning conversion tool. It will also convert Open Office Impress files. You don’t need any plugins or downloads to do the conversion, it is all done online. Once the presentation is converted you can still edit it by inserting tests between slides and recording audio. The resulting courses will then be tracked in your SCORM reports.

Dokeos also has an integrated virtual classroom and virtual meeting room which Moodle doesn’t have at present. This is a nice feature and will support the growing use of virtual classrooms. The virtual classroom is intended for one-to-many training scenarios. Your slideshow appears in the main content area while participant videos, chat and slide details appear on a side panel. It has whiteboard widgets that allow you to annotate the main content area as you go. The virtual meeting room is more interactive, allowing up to four participants to interact online.

We suspect that in time such modules will be developed for Moodle but at present Dokeos has the edge in these areas.

In terms of the open source community, the Dokeos forums are fairly well populated. There are over 4,000 registered members. While this pales in comparison with Moodle’s half a million registered members, it does mean that the forums are pretty active and good place to look for support. Compared to the other non-Moodle open source LMS communities the Dokeos community has a smaller number of registered users but a much larger number of forum topics and posts, meaning the community is more active and supportive.

There are 40 or so extensions contributed by the community ranging from RSS Readers, polls, resource reservations, peer reviews and gradebook. A selection of stylesheets and icon packs are also available for download.

The challenge for Dokeos will be building a large user base to compete with say the Moodle community, however, if you need a simple, rapid LMS solution that is ready to go out of the box, which has good quiz and reporting features and you want virtual classrooms then you should give consideration to Dokeos.

Have a look at the site we set up at http://kineoopensource.dokeos.com, you can self-register and login.

This is an independent Kineo review, we have accepted no payment or inducement to write nice things.

Find out more at http://www.dokeos.com

For more on open source solutions visit Kineo Open Source.