Sometimes I really get excited thinking about OpenACS/.LRN. So please allow me to share with you my vision on an abstract level without dealing with technical and financial implications.
Can we move .LRN back to OpenACS?
Imagine a system where everything is a service. The central services are content-repository, workflow and permissions. Based on them we have groups, categories and further services (1).
An institution that wants to use OpenACS can define any logical structure it needs with categories. One category tree could reflect the organisational structure of an institution. In the area of e-learning this might be schools, faculties, departments, classes, communities. Category trees and groups can be defined manually in the system or can be imported from external systems. Each group can provide references to services. A service could be using atomic services direclty (2) or workflows that instantiate required services on demand.
With this solution OpenACS would provide a system that is community, content and workflow centered. There would be no need for an institution to provide several systems like a all the different *MS available (3).
I believe that this is the real strength of OpenACS. There are different activities that try to achieve similar stuff like the E-Learning Framework (4) or the OKI OSID (5) or OSGi (6).
One note to lors, assessment and grail. Don't they all represent more or less the counter parts of the standards SCORM, IMS QTI and IMS LD? All standards are runtime systems that reference content or in case of IMS LD and SCORM even services. Thus they all could be based on a general workflow package (like the old for petri nets). Instead of writing several runtime engines each could provide a workflow template (thank to Gustaf for the idea) that is instantiated by the workflow engine on demand. Maybe this is a too ambitious thought. Looking at some other CMS projects like Alfresco (7) or Nuxeo (8) they started with content and move now towards workflow.
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(1) like forums, file-storage, calendar, wiki, lors, assessment, grail…
(2) calendar, wiki, file-storage, assessment, …
(3) * for content, document, workflow, learning, knowlegde …
(4) http://www.elframework.org/framework - Check out the services and you will be reminded of the OpenACS architecture Rocael presented in Vienna
(5) http://okicommunity.mit.edu/staticpages/index.php?page=OverOKI – See section “Summary of the OSIDs“
(6) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Osgi_layer.png – Different names for the same thing. Just replace c/c++ with tcl/xotcl, bundle with package, OSGi Framework/Java Runtime with kernel and aolserver.
(7) http://www.alfresco.org/architecturediagram.html
(8) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/products/
