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Introduction

KinesinLMS is a Learning Management System (LMS) designed to be a simple, easy-to-use, and flexible platform for managing and delivering online courses. It's a 'just enough' LMS that you can use as a base for your e-Learning experiments and research projects.

KinesinLMS is built on the Django web framework and uses standard open-source tools and libraries wherever possible:

...and so on.

For more complex things like badges, email automations, surveys and forums, KinesinLMS expects you'll use third-party services and therefore provides simple integrations for each...although there's nothing stopping you from creating your own custom implementations of these features.

Hypermedia and "Rich" Interactions

KinesinLMS is opinionated about "rich" clients: it assumes that for most user interactions you can use basic, boring Django views and templates...but when you need more interactivity, you can use "hypermedia" via HTMx to get immediate and engaging interactions without introducing a complicated front-end framework. Furthermore, using HTMx allows the developer to continue to use the simple (and effective) Django form classes rather than crafting custom APIs and shuttling JSON back and forth for every interaction.

However, certain features like fully interactive assessments (e.g. DiagramTool ) may require a more complex front-end. In that case we use React. But we try to keep the React components as simple as possible, and continually re-evaluate whether we need React and its build system at all. (Web components are another option we're considering to further reduce complexity.)

We try to remember that the benefit of each "rich" interaction added to the platform must be balanced against the complexity it introduces, potentially increasing the number of developers who need to work on the project and decreasing the number of students who can access the course through their (potentially limited) mobile devices.

Background

KinesinLMS originated as a custom e-Learning platform developed by McQuillen Interactive for Science Communication Lab (SCL) as part of SCL's iBiology Courses project. SCL funded the work with support from the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (grants numbers R25GM116704 and R25GM139147).

iBiology Courses is an e-learning site dedicated to helping university students and post-graduate researchers become better scientists and enhance career and professional development. The iBiology Courses e-Learning platform was built from scratch after the team struggled to find a simple, agile and easily extensible platform for SCL's unique e-learning research goals.

In 2023, SCL was funded by a supplementary National Institute for General Medical Sciences grant to make the iBiology Cources custom e-Learning platform open source and available to the broader scientific community. KinesinLMS is the result of that effort!

Where to Go from Here

Some devs prefer to learn by doing. If this is you, it's probably best to get right into it by setting up a local instance, and then loading the "Demo Course" archive (resources/courses/demo_course_archive.zip) so you can see what a course looks like, both in the public-facing "Catalog" and when you've enrolled in the course.

The quick start on the next page will help you get the system going.

Note

These docs are a work in progress. We've tried to fill them out with background on most high-level features, but if something's wrong or missing please let us know -- or write it yourself and submit a PR to help us document KinesinLMS!