Open eClass review: the free, open-source course management system from GUnet used by universities. Features, hosting options, pricing and top alternatives.
Open eClass is a Course Management System developed and maintained by GUnet, the Greek Academic Network, as the open-source e-learning platform used across most of Greece's public universities and many schools. It was first released in 2003, building on the earlier open-source Claroline platform, and has since been rebuilt through several major architecture generations while remaining free and GPL-licensed.
The platform is designed to let instructors and institutions run fully asynchronous online courses: publishing materials, managing enrollment, running assessments, and communicating with students, without the licensing costs associated with commercial LMS products. Institutions can either self-host the platform on their own infrastructure or use GUnet's free hosted service for smaller deployments.
Open eClass covers the core needs of a modern LMS: course content repositories, assignment and quiz tools, calendars, announcements, discussion forums, messaging, and gradebooks, alongside registration and role-based access control for instructors, teaching assistants, and students.
Because it is open source and built on open standards, institutions can integrate it with existing identity and network services, extend it with custom modules, and run it independent of any specific operating system, which matters for public institutions that need long-term control over their software stack.
Open eClass carries no licensing fee. Institutions with their own IT staff typically self-host the open-source codebase at no software cost beyond their own server infrastructure and maintenance time.
Institutions without the resources to self-host can instead use GUnet's free hosted service at free.openeclass.org, which provides the platform as a managed service without charge, funded as part of GUnet's mission to support Greek academic e-learning.
Yes. Open eClass is distributed under the GNU GPL license with no licensing fees. Institutions can self-host it for free or use GUnet's free hosted service at free.openeclass.org.
It is developed and maintained by GUnet, the Greek Academic Network, a nonprofit consortium of Greek academic and research institutions founded in 2000 and based in Athens.
The first version, released in 2003, was based on the open-source Claroline learning platform before evolving into its own independent codebase across later generations.
Yes, the source code is publicly available under an open-source license and the interface supports English alongside Greek, though most production deployments and community support are Greek-centric.
Both are free, open-source course management systems. Open eClass has a larger footprint within Greek academia specifically, while Moodle has a much larger global install base and plugin ecosystem.
Yes, it includes built-in tools for assignments, quizzes, and gradebook tracking as part of its core course management feature set.
No. Institutions using GUnet's free.openeclass.org hosted service simply request a course space rather than installing or maintaining server infrastructure themselves.