Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Update on eduTools and request for Contrib uploads

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
My understanding is the EduTools reviews the official release. So we need a new official release to get a new review. I think this next release of .LRN should use maturity levels not "Certification" for packages. If we use "Certification" only the "ceritified" packages will be evaluated by organizations like "EduTools". Other open source projects don't have this hurtle so we are keeping ourselves off of a level playing field.

Last time Carl coordinated communication with EduTools staff. They do thier own review but they are interested in our write up as a basis.

Since Nov. 1st 2006, edutools has a new CMS Comparison page.

http://edutools.info/item_list.jsp?pj=4

The previous version had all the data from .LRN, but the new one does not. Looking at this thread I understand Carl introduced the previous review. Should the .LRE review be "upgraded" as well? (or at least introduce the previous one to maintain visibility) Should we wait for the next release?

Cheers.

They have a form for reviewing products. I'll work on filling it out.
Hi Carolin,

Thanks for making the review in eduTools. I've seen it and I miss some information under 'Accessibility Compliance', 'Instructional Design Tools', 'Instructional Standards Compliance' and 'Windows Server'.

According to https://openacs.org/xowiki/Accessibility and taken into account the work done for the 2.2.1 release, .LRN core meets WAI WCAG 1.0 Level A.

Regarding Instructional Standards compliance, you should add IMS-MD and of course, IMS-LD! .LRN is currently the only LMS that implements the three levels of IMS-LD standard. More info is available in xowiki: https://openacs.org/xowiki/Educational_Standards.

Regarding 'Instructional Design Tools' it refers to "Instructional design tools help instructors creating learning sequences, for example, with lesson templates or wizards". I don't think IMS-LD can be included here, but I think Assessment includes the possibility of creating questionnairs and within the Evaluation package you can also define some kind of learning sequences.

Finally, regarding the Windows server, I think it can be mentioned the works done by ]open-project[ and Maurizio Martignano (https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=551255).

This last one is really important because it is one of the criteria used for evaluation LMS. For instance, the Edutech Evaluation of Open Source Course Platforms considered the following killer criteria:
1. Support for multiple languages (esp. English, French, German, Italian)
2. Server runs on multiple operating systems
3. Integrated/homogeneous learning environment (not just a collection of tools)
4. Active development, with at least 2 full time developers
5. Active community
6. Basic e-learning tools are available
7. Basic documentation is available

Olga

Hi,

'Accessibility Compliance', 'Instructional Design Tools', 'Instructional Standards Compliance' and 'Windows Server' features have been updated in EduTools review. If you miss some other features or consider that there is information missing, please post them here and we will update them.

All of us can contribute to have this information up to date.

Thanks.