Vanilla is a complete Course Management System (CMS). It runs on a server and is accessible via a standard web browser from anywhere in the world, security permitting.
Vanilla provides tools for educators to create courses, providing access controls so only enrolled students can gain access. Vanilla contains a wide variety of tools to make your courses more effective. It provides mechanisms for the uploading and sharing of existing materials, as well as the creation of new pages, discussions, quizzes, assignments, wikis, blogs, and many more.
At it’s simplest, Vanilla allows for the upload and sharing of documents in any format supported by the end-user. Additonally, educators can create standard text and web pages using the simple built in WYSIWYG editor. Beyond that, Vanilla provides the capability for educators to create detailed assignments, quizzes, surveys and many other assessment tools.
Research and publications suggest that an E-Learning system should be flexible, affordable, extensible and well supported.
Typically, existing solutions do not satisfy all criteria. There are two main categories of product available. Traditional, closed, proprietary systems such as Web CT and free open-source solutions such as Moodle.
Web CT and similar systems tend to be expensive. Typical large scale installation costs can be upwards of £15,000, with similar figures quoted for support contracts. Such contracts do not include extensions of the software in enabing it’s effective use in a learning environment. There is generally no facility providing programmatic access to the purchased system, meaning little opportunity to integrate with other systems.
The open-source offerings, like Moodle, are at face value free of charge. They are supported by large developer communities, extensive documentation and direct commercial support companies. Moodle is fully-featured and compares well with the traditional systems. However, Moodle comes with little direct support and requires dedicated human resources in order to populate and develop it. Costs saved from the initial purchase and following support contract are quickly lost with the expense of developing and running the software.
Vanilla is a solution that fills the gap between these two models. A low cost commercial product supported by the team that built it. It provides a complete solution including Learning Management System (LMS).
