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We have a not for profit curriculum that a few schools are starting to use for their students. We need a website that will enable teachers to download the course materials, share their own materials and activities for each lesson, have discussions, and give feedback.

I have looked into multiple Learning Management Systems (like Moodle) and they all seem to be centered around the student (our site is exclusively for teachers of our curriculum).

Any suggestions (including thinking out of the box) are welcome.

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    Hosted or self-hosted? – unor Apr 6 '15 at 23:33
  • Either (with focus on cost to run). If hosted, should be private (better if it is not a public social network). Ability to use our own domain would be a plus. – adgelbfish Apr 7 '15 at 2:48
  • Do you have any education-related requirements? Your description sounds like any document management system could do, in particular those designed for small companies or small teams, even not in the education field. Is there something special about teaching or education that makes you need a software that is more specialized to your needs? – Nicolas Raoul♦ Apr 8 '15 at 3:38
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Yahoo Groups could do your bidding. I haven't tried it since the new interface, but I've used it multiple times a few years ago to share materials with other students working on the same project.

  • You can create public or restricted groups where one could only join via invitation
  • Members can upload files and folders to the group for other members to download (Limit of 100MB per group)
  • Members can have discussions through direct messages or through topic threads, similar to forums
  • Group managers have the ability to create polls to ask for feedback from the group members

Groups can have other features, such as database tables and calendar events. It is free, so give it a test run

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  • We would rather not use something that is a public social network – adgelbfish Apr 7 '15 at 5:30
  • @badge-be You could create a private group – Tymric Apr 7 '15 at 5:37
  • It would still be better if it was our site or business or educational oriented site. Maybe there is something like that which is self hosted. – adgelbfish Apr 7 '15 at 5:44
  • @badge-be I understand. It's better if you add that to your requirements in the question. I could also delete the answer if you think it's inconstructive – Tymric Apr 7 '15 at 5:47
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Alfresco is probably the best self-hosted tool for that.

Features

Alfresco allows teams of teachers to:

  • Upload documents
  • Browse/download documents
  • Web preview: You can read a document without having to download it
  • Comment/discuss on a document
  • Organize documents in folders/categories/tags
  • Search for documents that contain a particular word
  • Sync to your desktop using CmisSync, for offline use (disclaimer: made by me)

Alfresco is not specific to education, it is also used by many other organizations.

Example of teachers collaborating via Alfresco

Using Alfresco, UCP shares 11,000 books and classroom materials in multiple digital formats with 500 schools and 20,000 teachers. It is an online community for teachers to share ideas, and also provides continuing education for teachers.

Reference: http://www.alfresco.com/customers/united-cerebral-palsy

Screenshots

Alfresco for teachers

Alfresco and CmisSync are free and open source.

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  • would be great, but I there are very few admin controls, such as, I don't see the ability to hide email addresses. – adgelbfish Apr 12 '15 at 14:27
  • The question does not have this requirement. Anyway, hiding email addresses is doable as described here: superuser.com/questions/900856/… – Nicolas Raoul♦ Apr 13 '15 at 8:58

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