Web-based Classroom Tools

Please note that this post is from 2008. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

From MakeUseOf.com by David Johannes:

Online collaboration between schools, teachers, and students has become increasingly apparent as our everyday routines become more and more connected via the internet. Of course, there are paid solutions that satisfy this need through Learning Management Systems, such as Blackboard Academic Suite, which frankly isn’t very good at all in my opinion. I can’t even count the number of times both teachers and students have complained about paid services that their respective institutions utilize. Well, now comes Studeous, a free (and better) alternative that allows for online collaboration in the world of academics.

The legal academic world has TWEN (from the folks that bring you Westlaw). Yawn. It works, but that’s about all anyone can say about it. I suppose it’s pretty much free to the institutions, since the real point of academic Westlaw subscriptions is to hook students on the (expensive) service so that when they enter a firm, they have a commitment to paying for Westlaw (vs. the competition, i.e., LexisNexis).