CourseLit

CourseLit is an open-source, self-hosted learning management system. It serves as a comprehensive learning management system designed for individuals and businesses to build, host, and sell online courses and digital downloads directly from their own websites. The platform provides a dedicated environment for educational content delivery.

The software is deployed as a web application and can be self-hosted on a private server or accessed via a cloud-hosted version. It provides a centralized administrative dashboard where instructors can manage the entire lifecycle of an online teaching business, from the initial creation of the curriculum to the final delivery of materials to the student. This makes it suitable for educators who require full control over their branding and student data.

Key features

• Course authoring tools for creating and structuring educational content
• Student management system for tracking and administering learners
• Payment processing integration via Stripe for course sales
• Built-in website builder for creating a professional online presence
• Custom sales pages to optimize course promotion and conversion
• Support for selling and distributing digital downloads
• Basic analytics for tracking platform performance
• Extensibility through the development of custom widgets

The platform is architected as a mono-repo using Pnpm workspaces for dependency management. For the handling of media assets, CourseLit integrates with MediaLit, which can be utilized as a paid cloud service or deployed as a separate self-hosted instance to maintain complete data sovereignty. The backend relies on MongoDB for data storage, and the system employs a chronological script-based migration process to handle database updates and schema changes.

CourseLit is a batteries-included LMS for creators who want to maintain ownership over their teaching infrastructure.