Forum .LRN Q&A: E-LANE project to contribute to the .LRN effort

Can be said that the main objective of e-lane is to support distance learning through the internet with a pretty high support for not fully online environments, since the tool will be used on real life “demonstrators” in Latin American countries.

The main areas that we’ll address are:

1. Tool Integration & Refinement
1. Support for different scenarios is considered, especially on those synchronous and asynchronous, with different types of deliveries depending on your previous defined bandwidth capabilities.

i.      Improve / use tools for synchronous and high BW, like chat (jabber) and audio / video streaming

ii.      Low BW communication, as full email communication with .LRN (like having any change / contribution to .LRN by email in both ways)

iii.      Synchronize a .LRN installation among other instances in different servers, take into account that one of those installations could be not available to the internet some times (lets think on a .LRN installation on a remote place which has PC’s but not internet)

iv.      An easy to run a standalone .LRN instance on any relatively new PC (probably Knoppix might be the way to go but also we seriously consider a windows solution), and in some way to synchronize in both ways with external data.

v.      Possibility to export all the content, and more important, the .LRN GUI to some sort of html pages and directories in order to give a quite similar .LRN experience to the end user in that way.

2. Better user behavior tracking and profiling
3. A .LRN wizard, to help new users to get comfortable in .LRN, also will have standard “tutorials” for intermediate and advanced users.
4. Improve online testing
5. Polling system
6. Integration with Dspace
7. Potentially a development of a KMS embedded on openacs and extended to specially on learning issues.
8. Having .LRN standards compliant to SCORM, IMS and maybe OKI.
1. This will allow us a “full” export / import of the content, for easily transportability that will allow that content to be used in other delivery tools like msm.com/elearn
2. Content Development: this means the courses to be taught, those will be developed based on standards like IMS / SCORM, in that sense .LRN will need to be able to import / export it. Also here, a more deeper localization / translation effort might be done, specially in languages like Spanish which is quite different through the different countries that speaks it.
3. Methodology: this will define the different kinds of methodologies that should be followed (with their technical and content requisites) in order to reach different types of groups.
4. Demonstrators: is to use the 1-3 integrated to give live course to target groups on Latin American countries. In this sense in Guatemala will start the next month (January 04) a fully distance learning Master that will be using only .LRN as a base.
5. Dissemination and Sustainability: although we will use postgres as DB backend, we’ll make available all the development on oracle as well, since we want to ensure that the code will be “live” in the community, used by as many possible users (that might be using oracle) and that the features requests and bug fixing comes from both sides (oracle & pg). And of course, one of the main goal during all the process of the e-lane project is to disseminate the use of .LRN as much as possible to any kind of institutions (educational, ngo’s, government, etc.), take into account that the “partners” of this project comes from 9 different countries from Europe and Latin America.

As long as we do not intend to address all of ours objective quite soon, it’s a realistic plan for doing it progressively in the next months. Our propose is to coordinate this effort within the community to ensure to not “re-invent” the wheel again.

Any suggestions or comments are very welcome! … since the path to follow stills to needs to be fully written, more comming next!… ;o)

at present I don't have any concrete plans for new proposals.

Kind regards,

Carlos