Forum .LRN Q&A: Who is Using .LRN?

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1: Who is Using .LRN?
Posted by Alfred Essa on 11/11/03 05:49 PM
If you are using .LRN in a production setting or about to go live, can you please a brief message (paragraph or two) on this thread. Name the institution or organization, how you are using or plan to use .LRN, and one or two priorities for the next few months. Also, let us know if there are any nettlesome issues you face with which the community might be able to help. Thanks.
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2: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 11/11/03 06:01 PM
.LRN has been in production use at MIT's Sloan School of Management for over two years. The local instantiation is called "SloanSpace" and is used for all Sloan courses and tens of communities, including student clubs and research communities.

Our local priorities are:

  • Upgrade to .LRN v2 by end of January 2004. Our primary focus for the next two months will be to work on a stabilizing .LRN v2.

  • Improve .LRN usability and look and feel. This is the most significant feedback we receive from our users: ".LRN needs to look polished and sexy. The interface in some areas is also clumsy."

  • Install and support .LRN instances to MIT research centers. We are targeting about 10 new .LRN instances at MIT by March 2004.

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3: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 11/11/03 07:24 PM

In Heidelberg we have had a .LRN 1.0 instance running non-stop since April. We have been using it for our internal communication and for a few courses (mainly from the English department).

With everyone's help we have been pushing a 2.0 version that supports multiple languages and external authentication (glad to see OpenACS 5.0 beta 1 hit the floor today). As our 2.0 installation slowly comes online (30K+ users will have access to the system thanks to the external authentication work) over the next few weeks, we will be focusing on getting bugs ironed out.

Local priorities over the next few months (secondary to the 2.0 release):

  • Improve forums. The old bboard module may not have looked as nice, but it is very obvious that it has been refined over the years. Forums starts to crack when it is used heavily... users suffering because of it.
  • Complex Survey. We need this in my medical school in the first quarter of next year.
  • Improve file storage. Luckily, we have people pushing this forward and they have OpenACS's need for a good CMS in the back of their minds.
  • Revive the now dead community page.
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4: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Samer Abukhait on 11/11/03 08:46 PM
Birzeit University/Palestine has been using a modified system based on ACS4 since April 2002.

The System provides much functionality for students, instructors and administrative employees, starting from the simple student schedule to a complex online registration process.

Birzeit now is in the process of adopting .LRN (we'll be running v2 as a system for Training Courses before the end of the year.)

We plan to extend the system to do some financial and human resource management for the courses... I'll be posting our progress...

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5: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Joerg Winckler on 11/12/03 10:46 AM
Hi,

The University of Heilbronn, Germany has launched a pilot for dotLRN since 9/2003. It is used by computer science departments for roughly 4 courses.

We need to have ironed out bugs in 1.0.1. We are disappointed that we run often into problems and have no possibility to patch our installation. We tried to find a stable branch in CVS but we failed (any help appreciated).

We would like to upgrade as soon as possible to 2.0 but there must be a stable branch in CVS (e.g. using the tag "dotlrn 2.0.0_01"...) which allows us to integrate proven, stable patches.

I don't know the new features of 2.0 but hope, that it includes

  • notification, when new documents (file storage) are available
  • start- and enddate of visibility of documents in the file storage
  • learning control tests (multiple choice, true/false, ...)
  • hierarchical homework folders

Best regards,

Prof. Dr. Jörg Winckler

 

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6: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Erik Valevatn on 11/12/03 01:59 PM
At the University of Bergen, Norway, we have had .LRN in production  since august 2003 as the main administrative student portal for all our 17 000 students. We have around 1 500 subjects and around 1000 other groups in the system, and external inclusion and validation of users.

We had to iron out some processing bottlenecks that made the system quite sluggish and some other bugs in the start, and now it is running quite nicely with between 4000 - 6000 logins per day.

We are planning to upgrade to v2 in january, mainly to get Oracle 9i compatibility, but also to get new functionality. We are planning to use a clustered solution for Oracle and possibly also load balancing for the web server. At the moment we are managing quite well on two Dell 2650 servers, but we expect higher load as more subjects will be using more functionality.

We also guide students over to more dedicated LMS-systems, and plan single sing-on transfer to them as sell as webmail. We are happy for more LMS-functionality in .LRN, and are also looking at central solutions for Portfolio and content management for learning objects.

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7: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Matthew Burke on 11/12/03 04:03 PM
One-half of the CS department at St. Mary's College of Maryland (i.e. me) has been using .LRN for one semester and OACS for 1.5 years.

One of the biggest headaches has been not being able to bulk load calendar items.  Most of the other problems have not been specific to .LRN but have been OACS stuff.  For example, I continue to have headaches when upgrading packages and OACS versions.

An item that might be of interest to some folks is that I have  (slowly) been working on some tools to allow an OACS install to send and receive IM (from AIM only now but will add a few other services soon).  If you can't or don't want to use the Jabber tools this might (when it's ready for prime time) be of some use.  Currently I am using it in a pilot program where I have students use it for keeping a metacognitive diary.

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8: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 7)
Posted by Bruce Spear on 11/12/03 04:27 PM
I am reporting from the Free University of Berlin, where we have four courses and about 200 users in the social sciences connecting to .LRN v1 since the semester began two weeks ago.

This is a bottom-up initiative in a notoriously top-down institutional setting, but thanks to the efforts of many (including the .LRN folks I mentioned in a recent post here) we are quickly gaining interest and support from faculty and adminstration.

Our immediate goal is to develop user tutorials, a manual of best practices, and build a small community of dedicated users upon which we may seek additional funding to support our present instance and expanding but still modest user base.

At this point, we are less concerned with developing additional features than we are with helping make the current feature set more user-friendly. Hence, my solicitation of interest in documentation.

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9: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by kirat singh on 11/12/03 06:37 PM
The Bachelor of Elementary Education (BElEd) program at the University of Delhi is working on implementation of the dotLRN (CVS head version) for virtual-syncing the existing community spread across five undergraduate colleges (which run the BelEd program). The implementation is bi-lingual (English + Hindi). available at (www.beled.net)

Current Status: The base application is ready and Content Digitisation and upload is under process.

Current Scope: The main idea is to normalise the knowledge spread across the five participating undergrad-colleges, through active discussions and course-content sharing.

Future Direction: To be able to establish separate sub-sites for the participating colleges for course/class management functionality and synchronise with the course-wide knowledge-base that cuts across the colleges and provides a common pool of resources.

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10: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Felipe Gelbcke Gubert on 11/12/03 06:55 PM
In Brazil:
-Empresa Brasileira de Produtos Agrícolas (Embrapa),
-CGECon (Centro de Gestão do Conhecimento at MRE-Brazilian Ministry),
-MDIC(Brazilian Ministry).
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11: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Felipe Gelbcke Gubert on 11/12/03 07:03 PM
-Empresa Brasileira de Produtos Agrícolas (Embrapa),
Using 1.0.1 and waiting for 2.0.

-CGECon (Centro de Gestão do Conhecimento at MRE-Brazilian Ministry),Using 1.0.1 and waiting for 2.0.

-MDIC(Brazilian Ministry).Using ACS 3.2.5 and waiting for dotlrn 2.0.

A lot of other institutions in Brazilian Government are waiting for the new (translated) version.

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12: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/13/03 01:30 AM
We at the Vienna University of Economics and Business
Administration are using currently an OpenACS based
System covering all first-year courses and a few courses
for higher semesters. Currently we have more than 16.000
registered users, we are supporting roughly 300 classes in
this semester, the system sees e.g. this week an avg
of about 2mio requests per day. A paper describing our system is here:
http://nm.wu-wien.ac.at/research/publications/b318.pdf

Our plan is to incorporate .LRN by Feb/March 2004 unless
we are hit by major performance penalties.

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13: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Georg Lehner on 11/14/03 03:36 AM
The National Engineering University of Nicaragua - UNI is using dotLRN in production since August 2003.

As we are using recent CVS versions of all involved Software (to be able to use internationalization) we are actually busy with debugging, unicode display and entry issues.

We are experimenting spurious locks of the aolserver/postgres too.

On the other hand we are producing/tranlsating user documentation into spanish.

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14: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 11/14/03 04:19 AM
Thanks Al for this call for information.
Many of the users are new too me and I will be adding them to the case studies section of the dotlrn.org site.
I would appreciate if those involved with the projects already there could have a look at what is written and let me know of any errors.
Thanks!
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15: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 11/16/03 12:59 AM
I am leading a pilot-program to study adoption of dotLRN at Utah State University, initially at the Computer Science department.

The university is switching its student information systems to Banner, which is Oracle-based, so we'll be looking into that (if anyone has information on Banner integration, I'd be happy to hear it).

-Roberto Mello

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16: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Venkatesh Goteti on 11/20/03 07:11 PM
AIESEC uses .LRN on it's production site (AIESEC.net), this was preceded by ACES. The organisation uses the platform to connect it's student members, staff, alumni and stakeholders across 80+ countries. The system is strategic to their plans and complements many stages of their core business(work) process. And, they constantly are innovating their model by modifying and expanding the features of this system on an ongoing basis. Currently, AIESEC is integrating another system (non-OpenACS) which is used to manage their student-Exchange programmes worldwide into AIESEC.net. Ppl who can provide more information on this system are Denis Roy, Markus Knoke, Tilmann Singer and Dirk Gomez, as they had/have been working on it. Ernie Ghiglione and Kolja Lehmann could provide information on the current integration plans (Ernie was responsible for managing the development of the other system, known as Insight-II, while Kolja is currently in India leading the systems integration efforts). And, yes as you notice the project has quite a few people from the community involved in it's development.
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17: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 14)
Posted by Venkatesh Goteti on 11/28/03 01:11 PM
Rafael...quick question....

Can non-university dotLRN installations be profiled on the case-studies pages that you and Ernie put up. We have AIESEC.net as a large dotLRN installation that could be profiled as well, if possible. I could compile the case-study and mail you, if you could use it. Ernie would be able to give some details about it, as he developed on it as well.

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18: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 11/28/03 03:20 PM
Venkatesh

Yes, I have already some "organizations" including AIESEC.
I will have to collect more info, probablbly in February since Ernie is overseas and I am going on holidays soon

cheers

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19: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 17)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 11/28/03 03:21 PM
Venkatesh, We want to include all installations, including non-university. I am sure that Rafael will want to incorporate your case study.
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20: Galileo University (Guatemala): (response to 1)
Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 12/09/03 02:26 AM
We are actually running a highly modified ACES, which we call GES (Galileo Educational System).

Our plan is to migrate to .LRN, which do not only consist on data migration, which is a considerably work, but also:

The port of packages and some enhancements already made on ACES:

  • Evaluation Package: for grading everything that course might have, from exams to projects, tasks, etc.
  • SMS gateway
  • Synchronize .LRN with the university’s administrative database, in order to create automatically the classes, terms, departments, users and move them across classes, put the students calendar into the calendar system, upload the student photo, etc.
  • Handling different scopes for surveys with support for anonymous survey.
  • Having the well know portlets of “new stuff” for forums, calendar items, file-storage that ACES used to have.
  • And improve some small things that we have polished through the time here.

Integrate the previous work done here on LDAP / Aolserver / ACES to the new authentication system that openacs has.

The migration will happen on June / July 04 (we'll start on the very first process on January), but the new packages and features should come in the next couple of months.

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21: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Abelardo Pardo on 01/26/04 09:59 AM
The E-LANE project which aims at deploying an elearning platform with a set of courses in several communities in Latin America plans to use .LRN as a platform.

The project started on Dec. 03 and lasts for 3 years. During this period the objective is to deploy the required elearning infrastructure (.LRN, courses, methodology, etc) in several Latin American countries and achieve the highest possible dissemination of such platform.

The project consortium is coordinated by Carlos III University of Madrid and counts with 10 partners. Among them, we count Universidad Galileo of Guatemala.

Our priority for the next few months is to define the required features in the platform and see how to integrate them with the on-going effort in .LRN

Abelardo Pardo

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22: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Volin Karagiozov on 01/26/04 05:52 PM
I am reporting from the American University in Bulgaria.We are at the very beginning of experimental installation and using of .LRN. In parallel with our efforts to initiate a Pilot Project (Thanks to Grigor Monovski!), three weeks ago we did an experimental installation of .LRN 1.0.1 on experimental "server" of Computer Science Department (It could be hardly named server - P4 at 1.3GHz with 256MB RAM). We have already 60 registered users (9 of them professors - mainly from the Computer Science Department), three active classes with 45 students and three communities created so far (we are at the second week of the semester).

Three senior students are involved also under the Independent study and/or Senior Project regulations to help the Computer Science faculty in implementing .LRN in our university.

I hope that our Pilot Project will formally start very soon - we are seeking some funding for it.Our goal now is through these "live" experiments to prepare ourself and other faculty for using .LRN immediately after the Pilot Project starts.

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23: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 02/04/04 02:25 PM

University of Mannheim

Software

  • dotlrn 2.0.0b4
  • PostgreSQL 7.3.4
  • MySQL 4.0.15
  • PHP 4.3.4
  • AOLServer 3.3oas.1
  • SuSE Linux 9.0 Kernel version 2.4.21-144-smp
  • gcc version 3.3.1 (SuSE Linux)

Hardware

  • Siemens Fujitsu
  • 4 CPU, each Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz

Some Data

  • Januar 20th 2004 (launch)
  • 21.000+ users (expect 15.000 more to come) in synch
  • started with few courses at present but much more expected this summer after introducing the plattform to all faculties

Greetings

Nima
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24: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Raúl V. Ramírez-Velarde on 02/04/04 05:41 PM
At ITESM (TEC de Monterrey) in Monterrey, Mexico, the Computer Science department started in January 2004 using dotLRN as an alternative to Blackboard (Blackboard courses go through a very complex process of redesign and authorization). It will be used in all continuous education programs, as well a non-redesigned undergraduate courses that need an e-learning platform. Currently, Computer Networks and Non-Linear Video Editing courses have been deployed using dotLRN.

Regards,

Raúl Ramírez

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25: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 24)
Posted by Raúl V. Ramírez-Velarde on 02/04/04 05:43 PM
Currently, our main concerns are automatic grading and feedback for on-line exams, and better habndling of scheduled task in the calendar.

Raúl R.

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26: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 24)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 02/04/04 06:12 PM
Very good to hear that ITESM is on board. I also wanted to let the community know that MIT and ITESM recently signed a formal agreement for faculty collaboration, particularly in the area of Management with the Sloan School. ITESM senior leadership came to MIT and met with us in November. Our senior leadership was at ITESM last week to sign the formal agreement. I participated in the meetings in November and there was an implicit understanding that we would also collaborate in educational technology, including .LRN. It's good to know that the CS department has already made the move to .LRN and is jump starting the process.
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27: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 25)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 02/06/04 01:49 AM

¡Bienvenidos!

It is great to have some people with your experience (e.g. with Blackboard) join the .LRN community.

FYI: There is a little group slowly forming around getting assessment (w/ grading) going and we plan to hold our first chat in the morning on the dotlrn channel at 15:30 hours GMT (some might be in the chat room a little earlier) to talk about how to move forward.

The chat will take place on the irc channel here: irc://irc.freenode.net/#dotlrn If you use the complete install of Mozilla simply follow the link. If not use your favorite IRC client and connect to the irc.freenode.net server. Then join the #dotlrn channel.

The logs will be here (e.g. if you can not make it): https://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/irc/

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28: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Álvaro Rendón on 02/16/04 06:36 AM
At University of Cauca (Popayán, Colombia), Department of Telematics, we are using GES (the platform developed by Galileo University) in the context of the E-LANE project. We are supporting some undergraduate courses with this platform as part of our activities on that project. You can see one of the courses (Sistemas Distribuidos) at http://dtm.unicauca.edu.co/pregrado/sist-dist.html.

As explained on messages posted by Rocael Hernandez and Abelardo Pardo, we plan to migrate to .LRN on a few months.

Right now our priorities are the definition of requirements regarding the needs of the Latin American communities, and the creation of contents for demonstration.

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29: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Orzenil Silva Junior on 02/16/04 11:34 PM
At FLACSO - Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciências Sociais, Brazil.
We're using dotLRN 2.0.0rc1 for:
- Intranet based system - managing documents with version control, internal comunications, event calendar management;
- Tutor based courses - managing a class and community site.

Priorities:
- jabber package to postgresql
- finish up brazilian portuguese translate

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30: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 29)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 02/17/04 07:22 AM
Hello Orzenil,

are you in contact with Björn Kiebye the author of the jabber package about this port, as I know he has been working on this a little bit.

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31: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Dario Roig on 02/17/04 08:21 AM
Hi!

At SPAIN - University of Valencia. We are using dotLRN 2.0.0rc1 in a project pilot of GroupWare.
Our plans are:
    -To prove the tool and to solve the dotlrn errors until July of the 2004.
    -To correct the scalibility errors, our university has on 80.000 students.
    -In September of the 2004 to use the tool massively for the whole university.

Dario

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32: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 31)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 02/17/04 02:39 PM
Dario, Are you using Oracle or PostGRES?
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33: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 32)
Posted by Dario Roig on 02/17/04 03:21 PM
Hi!

Our system this formed by two computers:

Computer A:
-Pentium IV 2U's
-2GB RAM
-120 GB HD
-S.O. LINUX DEBIAN 2.4.20
-DB POSTGRES 7.4.1

Computer B:
-Pentium IV 2U's
-1GB RAM
-120 GB HD
-S.O. LINUX DEBIAN 2.4.20
-AOLSERVER 4.0
-dotLRN 2.0.rc1

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34: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 30)
Posted by Orzenil Silva Junior on 02/17/04 10:51 PM
Thanks for your tip, Malte.
I posted a message to Bjorn Kiebye today. Maybe we could coordinate our efforts to work on it.
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35: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by sonali bhirud on 05/24/04 12:43 PM
Our company is using .LRN. We have issues regarding e-learning  that how it's possible.?

How interactive sessions is possible without any teacher?
How get permission to read dotlrn on www.beled.net site?

Please inform the perfect way.

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36: Re: Who is Using .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Felipe Gelbcke Gubert on 05/24/04 06:22 PM
At Embrapa:
www.cope.sede.embrapa.br
We are using dotlrn 2.02
1100 researchers are using the system
Desktop machine (1.2ghz)
Postgresql

Cgecon(migrating from acs3.2.5)
www.ead.cgecon.mre.gov.br
Dotlrn 2.02
3.500 users
Desktop machine (1.6ghz)
Postgresql

Starting the process of instalation in Fórum-PETI
at the Ministry of Justice.(Dotlrn2.03 with Postgresql)