Forum .LRN Q&A: Responding to the Commonwealth of Learnings Evaluation of dotLRN

I would like to write a response to the Commonwealth of Learning's evaluation of dotLRN.  If you read COL's report carefully you'll see that the winning system was evaluated based on features it was going to have, not just current functionality.  With dotLRN 2.0 almost out, dotLRN should have a significantly higher score.  I hope to write a simple letter that provides links to the evaluators to existing specs and documentation so that they can see the potential of dotLRN.

We can also look at this as an opportunity to learn how to target our marketing to future customers like COL, who have resources and are trying to decide which open source project to invest them in.

I could really use some help!  If you've read the report and want to help let me know. If you are listed below and have time to give me any information/pointers to information on the following projects it would be greatly appreciated.

Authentication: Collaboraid, what percent done are you in terms of implementing your spec?

Photo Book/Profiles: Jeff/Sloan: This module would contribute to our score on "Registration Features".  What is the status of this work? Has it been contributed back? Is there a description of what was actually built or a final spec I can point to?

Templates:  Does anyone have user documentation on class cloning?

Learning Objects and Extensible Content Architecture: S&R? Does anyone have an up to date document on the current status IMS/SCORM compliance.  Work in progress and specs are fine.

Web Authoring: Talli? Is there a publicly available spec on the webdav work I can point to?

Whiteboard: Malte? Do you have a document with status/plans for whiteboard?

Searching: What will be searchable in dotLRN 2.0?

AOLServer: Does anyone have a good link about why you should use AOLServer?

Installation Issues: Malte. Do you have a knoppix CD we can include in the letter?

My very incomplete draft can be found at: http://www.aristoi.biz/file-storage/?folder_id=2705

Okay, here are my $0.2.

User Registration: We have a user - registration module that we are going to release really soon now.

SCORM: No more updates from us at the moment, but ask Ernie directly.

Whiteboard: Too busy to look into it and make a plan.

Knoppix CD: We'd have to check and regenerate one, maybe even with a head checkout. And data (which we don't have). So if anyone wants to help us out here, send us a Postgres dumpfile of a head checkout that contains demo data and we'd incorporate it. English preferred (for Germans we have our own data).

On a seperate note, I think you are going in the right direction with your letter. Thanks for doing this!

Photo Book/Profiles: Jeff/Sloan: This module would contribute to our score on "Registration Features".  What is the status of this work? Has it been contributed back? Is there a description of what was actually built or a final spec I can point to?

We're putting the finishing touches on the Phase I functionality. It will need to be made more generic and ported to Postgres before it can be released; this will be done in upcoming phases. Sorry, no timetable yet.

It has diverged rather widely from our original spec, as unanticipated needs arose. I will see if someone can write up a description of what we actually built.

Hello Dee,

are the profiles dynamically editable? Can there be different profiles for the students, depending on the class and/or the role they have? Can the students explicitly allow or deny access to each piece of information or is it only per subset area?

Hello Dee,

thanks for getting back to me so fast. With my first question I meant, if the Profile itself (the questions asked by the system) can be changed (so in the course of the day you realize that you forgot to ask the students for their pet's name, that this is editable from the administrator instead of the developer).

If you want the multiple profiles, you might want to check out the user register we are going to upload within the next two weeks as this already supports multiple profiles which you could (with a little bit of additional development) link up to e.g. the signup process for a class. Though it does not include the fine grained permissions.

When you launched your RFC last year, two clients of ours had roughly the same idea, so we tried to make a generic package out of it, that could be amended in an easy way for all situations. I never go around to aggregate all the specs, but maybe I'll manage in the near future. The basic underlying idea is to have a package, that allows you to keep profiles (registers) of your users. At the moment we go so far as to say, you can enter the profile process using a URL and give it a return_url where users will be redirected to after they finished the registration. As a specific demand by GPI we added the ability to link registers to mailinglists which will sign up users for specific mailinglists. But you can imagine an easy interface that would allow you to signup users to forums or classes (e.g. if a new student enters MIT, he chooses a default curriculum, answers the questions of the default register (the thing that collects the profile data), and is subscribed to multiple classes. If the class has an additional register, the student will be redirected to fill out that register as well, otherwise he would be a pending student.).

Gotta run, more maybe later ;)

Dee, Janine and Carl,

Should a description of Sloan's "Photo Book" project be put on this page under "Profiles".  Is there anything else that we are considering "Profiles" for dotLRN2.0?  Is it still scheduled to be included in dotLRN2.0? Is the photo book code in production at Heidelberg?

https://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/roadmap#profiles

Is there anything else that we are considering "Profiles" for dotLRN2.0?  Is it still scheduled to be included in dotLRN2.0? Is the photo book code in production at Heidelberg?