We wrote about Nuvvo, a brave startup taking on an open source competitor, last January. However, Nuvvo is now up for sale. And it may soon be entering the DeadPool, depsite what the founders wrote on the Nuvvo blog: This does not mean Nuvvo is shutting down. Our many thousands of users around the world are dear to us and we will keep the service going for the forseable future. For a summary of recent small sales, many on ebay, see this post. → Read More
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. → Read More
