What is Hypatia?

Hypatia is a FREE, realtime, open source LMS (Learning Management System) focussed in UX and remote coworking. It uses cutting-edge technologies from Facebook and Google and you can use it to build your online school, academy or university.

Hypatia aims at solving the issues that current open source LMSs have, like bad and slow UX, old and cluttered designs and unresponsive layouts. The way these issues will be solved is by using the most advanced web technologies, like the shadow DOM for fast rendering, web sockets for realtime communication, JSON for standardised and formatted data, integration with 3rd party APIs and the latest HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript features to build a functional and beautiful UI following the best practices.

Hypatia is designed with universities and academies in mind. There's no size limit. It can be used for small academies (5 - 100 students) and for big universities (1K - 100K). The system will be scalable, allowing modules to be enabled/disabled based on the requirements of the organisation.

The project will be monetised by offering a freemium scheme. The premium version will include a maintenance fee to implement upgrades and custom/premium plugins.

The ultimate target of this project is to offer a solution to the open source community that replicates in the LMS World the pleasant experience built and developed by the Wordpress community. Flexible enough to suit the needs of the majority of educational projects by being scalable, easy to use/learn and opened to be used, modified and improved.

Hopefully, Hypatia will enable people around the world to make education more accessible and enjoyable, especially for those who live in developing countries.

Context and project justification

The reason why I chose to build a Learning Management System is because I keep seeing how things could be done better in many e-learning related websites. I particularly have a lot of things to say regarding the way students interact with each other and with the teacher. The current systems do not provide an agile communication. The interactive experience feels slow, with server related errors appearing often, annoying popup windows, cluttered UI with non-relevant data...

This problem is highly relevant, as online education is becoming more and more popular, especially in developed countries, where society is used to interact with computers in a daily basis. Not having an updated and well taken care of e-learning ecosystem, makes people’s lives more difficult, as they have to balance a highly productive job and personal environments with slow and unpleasant online learning experiences.

Having e-learning websites that don’t keep up with the rest of the web evolutions, makes the educational experience less enjoyable, which, in some cases, can make students give up their courses or entrepreneurs fail with their ventures.

To fix this situation, we need to improve the offer out there. Make the e-learning software community vibrant and competitive. That’s the reason I want to build a platform inspired on successful and modern realtime products, like Slack, Trello or Google Docs and integrate them in a rich, full-flavored and exciting e-learning platform.

There are other LMS already in the market with APIs and modern stacks, like Moodle (23% of market share), Canvas LMS, Blackboard (41% of market share), Matrix, D2L, Kaanu, etc. Unfortunately, they don’t offer good UX or they don’t make it easy for individuals to gain access to their software and/or modify it to offer a more customised experience for their students.

Objectives

• The most important goal is to offer a full-stack application to the open source community that enables developers and entrepreneurs to create their own e-learning sites
• The back-end will be driven by Google’s Firebase platform, which will simplify the infrastructure maintenance and scalability, making it easy for developers to start and deploy their apps
• The front-end will be initially built using Facebook’s React framework, although in a future, it can be ported to React Native to take advantage of the native Android and iOS features
• The second most important goal is to create a very polished UX by creating a well curated information architecture, easy to follow journeys and have as many user testing revisions as possible
• The simplicity of the navigation and the prioritisation of content is key. Only the most relevant content for a given section will be displayed. This will ensure that the UI remains uncluttered
• The application will implement as many real time features as possible, allowing users to be notified and to communicate with other users in an agile manner. No more old style forums, emails or other slow and cluttered systems to talk to each other or get updates from the system
• Include multi-language support, social user authentication and analytics
• Allow users to create themes for the UI. This will help other users with less web development experience to take advantage of the community to improve the look & feel of their e-learning sites
• Implement a basic admin area to allow teachers/admins edit the courses/subjects’ contents, calendars, users, payments, etc
• The essential journey should allow a user to signup/login, read about the available courses/subjects, join a course/subject (with or without paying), read/download the resources, interact with the classmates and teacher, read/download the assignments and watch the calendar
• Phase II: create a set of templates and guidelines to allow developers create plugins to enhance the functionality of the platform. These plugins could be new features, like the ability to solve quizzes or integrations of 3rd party services like Paypal, Stripe, Google Docs, Flickr, Dropbox, Slack, Trello, etc

When will it be ready?

Hypatia was born as a university graduation project in September 2016. Planning, design and development took place during the following months until April 2017, when the alpha version is expected. A few months after that, I should have a beta version ready and perhaps around mind 2017 we could have a RC version. Stay tuned!

Contribute or Contact

The initial part of the project (until the alpha version) is closed for contributions, as it's a university personal project that needs to be developed individually and then reviewed by the university board. After that, the project will be opened to contributions. If you have any question please contact me at hello {@} joanmira {.} com