Dokeos

For me Dokeos is a dream come true. I am a motivated educator with a non-existant budget, and just couldn't find anything that met my elaborate needs at a $0 price. At first I played with http://exelearning.org/wiki and that was cool, but they stopped all development in 2010 and that became a big issue. Then I found Dokeos, and realized what I thought was the ultimate poor man's elearning solution was nothing but a toy. Dokeos is a professional-level, full blown e-learning solution, and it's free. There were some small challenges along the way. Installing challenged my limited knowledge of mysql. It took a bit of time to learn all of the features, because it is packed with so many. For all of that their documentation and support forum were extremely helpful. I am in awe. They should hire me as a PR person (sales is primarily a transfer of enthusiasm). Must add that I am very familiar with html, and found myself like a kid in a candy store: almost anything can be customized. What defines "learning" is the exposure to something new, practicing it, and then getting feedback on your practice. Dokeos allows that process beautifully, online. There are 30 quizzes templates to choose from, a discussion forum, assignment tool, dropbox tool to share files, a gradebook and full blown reporting suite, private groups, chat tool, and so much more. Creating courses is easy, and also has many ready-made templates to choose from. You can easily embed sounds and videos (no need to install a Red5 server). The pro (for fee) version adds even more valuable features. I have started saving my pennies. When I grow up I will buy it.