Next Generation Open Source LMS

Digital Phoenix LMS (Abbreviated as DPLMS) is a web-application for instructors to use as a tool for organizing their coursework and student submitted materials. Our goal is to make this software easy to use for both the students and teachers while providing them with all of the major functionality that they would expect from similar proprietary solutions. DPLMS will be open source, so users will be free to change it to meet their needs.

There are three significant alternative learning management systems currently available. Solutions by Blackboard and Angel are proprietary, while Moodle is an open-source LMS. Both of the proprietary software solutions are typically too expensive for high schools to use. Their licensing systems require that the school pay a certain amount per student which would make using the program particularly costly in large schools. Moodle is a free, open-source alternative and we like a lot of the features it has, but we want to create a more intuitive interface and we feel that learning an existing system in order to modify it to accomplish our goals is more difficult than starting from scratch.

Our software will have the following major features (more in depth information and descriptions can be found in the use cases):

Teachers will be able to alert students by e-mail when content is added and announcements are made, view their classes, view and modify the grades of student assignments, moderate and post on class message boards, create assignments and view the assignments that students submit.

Students will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified of announcements and new content, view their classes, view their grades, post on their class message boards, view assignments and submit their work.

Administrators for the system will be able to setup and modify accounts, classes, and students.

What will DPLMS do that its competitors do not? Our software will be easy for the users to learn how to use. One of the complaints about the proprietary software Blackboard is that so many of the features are unintuitive. Blackboard’s user interface hides features under categories in a way that forces the user to look under each one to find what they’re looking for. DPLMS will have less functionality than the other systems, but having less features will allow it to be simple and easy to use. The user will be able to make fewer clicks for each action by not having to dig through categories. The simplicity of our system will let the user load pages faster and work quicker.

The stakeholders for our project are our development team and team instructors. Our development team is a stakeholder because we will be committing time and effort into working on the project. How hard the team works will affect the outcome of the final product which will be attached to our names as we work. The instructors are stakeholders because the requirements they place on us and the input they provide may affect the software we produce.

We have two significant risks that we have noticed at this phase of the development process. The first is that we have two team members that have little experience using PHP which is what we will be using to write the majority of our system. This is a risk because if they are unable to learn what they need to quickly, it will cause the project to progress slower than expected and potentially miss deadlines. The second risk is that our software has to be reasonably secure because grades and personal information is being stored in our system, and we need to make sure our system is secure enough that nobody will be able to steal or modify that information. This is a risk because security is a problem for all systems that store this type of information and there is no unified solution that works in all cases. Keeping this in mind, we can’t be sure we’ll be able to come up with a strong solution.