Actually, one of the interesting things about dotLRN (and about online learning applications in general) is that uses can vary enormously across the community. While I do think it is an excellent idea to have the use cases that MIT has in mind when they do their own development, I think it will be equally important for the future evolution of dotLRN to have community members develop and share their own use cases and personas. This is perhaps one of the best ways we can see collectively where dotLRN needs to evolve to meet the needs of its various consituencies.
Perhaps we could get started on this thread by simply having people chime in with quick sketches of how they envision dotLRN being used in their own organizations. What we come up with here could eventually form the starting point for various use cases and personas.
I'll start with several scenarios:
First, we may use dotLRN to host online classes for corporations. These users are not full-time students and will not have time or patience to learn a complex system. They will be interacting (usually) in single courses, not using the system every day for a variety of courses. In some cases, the courses will be entirely online, while in others they will support pre- and post-work for live classes. (This is called "blended learning" in the biz.) In this scenario, collaboration functionality (bboard, alerts, profiles, etc.) are particularly important.
Second, we may adapt dotLRN as a project portal, using class spaces as project spaces. In this scenario, some of the users (company employees) will be using the system regularly for a variety of projects while others (clients) will only be using it occasionally. In this scenario, content-sharing functionality (file-storage, FAQs, etc.) will be particularly important.
Note that there are different usability challenges to each of these scenarios.
