In this article I will present my view on conducting online courses: what are the players on the Internet, and which, in my opinion, is categorically lacking in RuNet (Aw, developers!). At the end of the survey.

It will be about Learning Management Systems ( LMS ) for individuals. Model situations are as follows:

• The teacher of the circle for middle school students in mathematics at the Palace of Pioneers has several groups. He wants to organize his material and somehow motivate children to do something at home at the computer.
• A university teacher together with his students wants to make a human electronic compendium of his lectures. With numbering of figures, a table of contents, formulas and similar LaTex's jokes.
• (my case) I am physically outside of Russia, I have some kind of teaching material of my own design, have invested in its design and want to make it accessible. Instead, I just want to amuse my vanity with the number of "likes" :). How to do this - I have no idea. I recently published a sample lesson on Habr. We calculate what year it is from the Big Bang in Python , and the next lesson will be tomorrow. During the day he was seen by an order of magnitude more people than I could hope for by placing him in any other place. But Habr is not an ideal place for such material.

So, wishes (in random order):

• Website traffic by the target audience,
• available (without special checks for the presence of a trunk),
• free (or very cheap),
• flexible layout options (embedding videos and visualizations, for example, from GeoGebra, numbering formulas, pictures, etc.),
• Russified interface.

Further briefly on the options that I examined and tested.

Haiku & MyHaikuClass (my choice)

www.haikulearning.com
www.myhaikuclass.com

The first is the engine for the school. An average of $ 5-10 per year per student (which is pretty good). All standard features are present and in good performance. We are more likely interested in this article for their subproject focused on an individual teacher (MyHaikuClass).

Allows you to create a course page without any checks. There are all sorts of goodies, including a wiki with access rights, rating, even integration with Google Drive. It allows you to create 5 classes and 2GB of space for files for free. Prices for large accounts are very reasonable! This is probably the best option for a small group with several teachers who want to organize their material. Support for formulas is, but rather primitive.

Of the minuses, perhaps, only the lack of a unified catalog of all courses and the Russian version of the interface. And, of course, the lack of a target audience.

Canvas & Canvas.net

www.instructure.com
www.canvas.net

Similar to the previous one. The first is an engine for the school, the second is something in the spirit of a hosting for courses.

Canvas.net is very close in ideology to what I would like to see. Anyone can register with a minimum verification by phone (implies affiliation with any American educational institution). After, create a course and make it open. At the moment, the site has a couple of dozen classes. Among them, there is nothing close to programming / math / physics. That is, as a result, the lack of normal work with formulas. Naturally, the project is in English. All these little minuses add up and it turns out that Haiku wins.

Google drive

In fact, no one bothers to organize your Google Drive well and store courses there. Communicate with students on Google Hangouts, have common documents, students can share their knowledge with the teacher, he makes corrections.

The version is classic and widely used. Problems with formulas and distribution of rights. The last engine could solve the following.

Openclass

www.openclass.com/home
LMS add-on over Google Drive with the ability to distribute access rights, rating and so on. Everything is very nice. One “but”, requires Google Apps, which has become paid. To get it for free, you need to become a non-profit organization in the USA (501 © (3)), which you don’t want to do because of the abundance of bureaucracy. The paid option is not satisfied, because the price per student per year will be inadequately high. Otherwise, it’s a great idea and good implementation (although at the time of my testing, Cyrillic support was naughty, but this is profitable, the engine is developing rapidly). But this is rather a solution not for the individual teacher, but for the school.

Corsera, edX et al.

These and similar sites are not considered at all. You can’t get on them if you are not affiliated with a large university, and he did not give you money to create a public quality course. The only good news is that Russian universities are gradually connecting to Corser. But, for example, a school teacher with his audience will never be there.

By the way, Edx is even open source (https://github.com/edX), but I’m afraid it would be too reckless to use their code.

Various Wiki

The first thing that comes to mind when you want to style the material is to use some kind of Wiki engine. There are many, full of free services. It’s easy to put it yourself. The problem is that only those who have the link will see it. In addition, no tool for normal interaction with the student. Otherwise, the ideal option, because plug-ins can achieve any layout.

Online LaTex editors

Essentially close to the Wiki. A tool rather useful for writing scientific articles. There are a lot of them. My choice: Authorea . Perfect for high school level, absolutely not suitable for students.

Full independent engines

Such as Moodle or Drupal with an add-on (e.g. www.opigno.org ). I mention them solely for completeness. The downside of all heavyweights is that it is impossible for a single teacher (or even a school in our realities) to maintain, update and monitor such systems. In addition, in my opinion, they are doomed to extinction. They will be replaced by the aforementioned "cloud" candidates.

Social network

Everything is pretty obvious here. Of the technical disadvantages: the lack of layout and normal management of documents, flexible access rights. Of the more abstract, a lack of learning atmosphere.

Runet

All of the above are foreign resources. What is in RuNet? Fully free-standing independent sites offering their courses. Each has its own engine and approach. To show the variety (without trying to list everything) I will give examples:
(if I forgot something important - write in a personal, add)

• There are courses from Yandex , HTML Academy , video lectures of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology , just sites with collections of lectures ( interneturok.ru , univertv.ru )
• Secondly, an uncountable number of sites for preparing for the exam. Almost everyone sells content. Someone specializes in whole classes (with an educational program, DZ, video lectures):
  100ege.ru , eftsh.ru , etc.
  Someone rather provides online tutoring opportunities:
  www.tutoronline.ru , gotovkege.ru , college.ru and other
• Thirdly, there is Diary.ru . Positioned as a school social. network, but you can look inside only through posts on the hub, because you just can’t register.
• [added after publication] I was sent several links that I wasn’t aware of and that I hadn’t yet managed to evaluate, I’ll add a description later: intuit.ru , universarium.org , hexlet.org ...
  At first glance, they’ll go straight to the point of my indignant articles, and the lack of mentioning them - my biggest flaw. So they sprinkle ash on their heads.

It is noteworthy for me that none of the above sites uses ready-made solutions. As an example (from my own experience) I can cite www.digitalchalk.com . And the great open source project bigbluebutton.com for recording / broadcasting video lectures / conferences.

Call to the developers

Total, in Runet full of sites dedicated to learning. But not one of them gives me the opportunity to place my course. In addition, most of them are dedicated to their own narrow separate topic, whether it is the exam or Excel training. Unfortunately, the spirit of the Courser, where you look at the catalog of various subjects and listen to something out of sincere curiosity and solely for the sake of knowledge, and then discuss with interested people, is not here. In my opinion, this is just not enough. Practically everything except the audience can provide Western resources, to which most of the review is devoted.

I think that copying Courser is futile. This scale cannot be reached in the Russian-speaking community (the number of the Russian-speaking population does not reach a critical mass). But you can think of a smaller scale. I personally would like to see an implementation similar to MyHaikuClass, in which teachers of schools and various circles, just altruistic teachers and student groups, could freely create and post their material in a convenient (and open) form, conduct classes. To all this, we need a system, which I would call a “exchange of courses”, a social superstructure over all this, initiating communication and interest in learning. Am I in the clouds or is there really not enough of such a domestic resource? :)

I will be glad to receive answers to the survey and discussion in the comments.

At the beginning of the article is a frame from the cartoon by Ivan Maksimov “Provincial School”.