Forum .LRN Q&A: Funded Opportunity for .LRN: Concord Consortium RFP

Carl Blesius and Al Essa have been contacted by the Concord Consortium (Concord, MA, USA) regarding an RFP for an e-learning platform development effort they have recently issued.  Concord Consortium has funding for this from the US Department of Education and is interested in using open-source alternatives to commercial platforms like Blackboard.  Based on my read of their requirements it looks like .LRN is a good fit.  Concord Consortium has indicated they are comfortable having us post this opportunity openly on the .LRN/OACS bboards.

Since the (soon-to-be-launched) .LRN Consortium has an interest in seeing one or more high-quality responses to this RFP from our community, as an Executive Board member I am happy to offer feedback on proposals to *qualified* vendors who plan to respond, if they like.  "Qualified" means vendors, or groups of vendors, which major .LRN users vouch for and suggest to .LRN EB members should respond to this.  We're using this screen since unfortunately I (and others) could not otherwise respond to everyone's requests for feedback.

Proposals are due by 5pm Eastern time on June 4, 2004.

Links:

The RFP and related FAQ:

http://fc.concord.org/rfp/00012884-80000002/

Concord Consortium Web Site:

http://www.concord.org/

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Posted by Matthew Burke on
I've looked over the CFP and it looks like a good opportunity.  Unfortunately, although I think I could manage the phase I work, I certainly don't have the resources to do phase II.

If anybody thinks having a math prof/ex-aDer might add a little to a proposal, I'd be interested in discussing a collaboration.  It'll have to be a quick negotiation since the proposals are due a week from tomorrow.

Matt

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
.LRN Won! We put together one, multi-vendor proposal.  More details in the news article.

https://openacs.org/news/item?item_id=190548

Excellent news! Congratulations to all.

Excellent opportunity to take all the great work that all the people that took part in the proposal have been doing, consolidate it, polish it, and re-learn some algebra in the process :) (part of phase 1 will include transferring a course from Blackboard to .LRN and it happens to be an algebra course...).

crb

P.S. Does this mean we might get an accessibility review out of this?

shall we post it in dotlrn.org?
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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Just wanted to give the community an update. The project is officially over, though the final demo is not until Aug 30.  We will hear whether we make it to Phase II (and if there is a Phase II) sometime after that.

The demo is located at http://www.lrnsolutions.com.  If you would like to view the demo and would be willing to put some time into creating professional and applicable demo content (e.g. thoughtfull forum postings, nice wimpy points, etc.) please contact me and I will set you up with an access.

As part of our contract with Concord Consortium we are making the specific code used for our demo site available at:

http://www.lrnsolutions.com:7500/cvs/viewcvs.cgi/

There is no intention to branch, we are working with Sloan and Galileo to put applicable changes back into .LRN and OpenACS.

Credit goes to the many people who worked on this project and to the community.

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Posted by Nima Mazloumi on
Hi Caroline,

I just registered my self at http://www.lrnsolutions.com.
What I already found out is the support-center you have added. This looks like our's here in Mannheim. I guess if you are using openacs-5-1-compat then it is not the internationalized version in HEAD, which is only working with 5.2.

Am I correct?

Greetings,
Nima

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Hi Nima,

I approved your membership (as well as a few other people).

Yes, you are correct on bug tracker.  The purpose of the site is demo a range of possiblities so they can decide what features might be usefull to them.  If they choose a particular package/feature for a live site we'll upgrade it to the best code available at that time.

Thanks
Caroline

Hi,

Are there people on concord consortium project working on porting enhancements and new code to .LRN?

I got the code from lrnsolutions cvs repository and there are interesting additions to .LRN i think could be very very useful. Great work was done. "Private Forums" and additions on LORS on editing content in file-storage using wysiwyg editor and adding metadata via LOM XML file upload are good examples.

I worked in these two last days on porting private forums and these lors additions on openacs-5-1-compat install i have for a new project i am working now and it was easy integrated with .LRN - just few modifications on forums and file-storage packages from OpenACS repository.

I think i could work on this on oacs-5-1 or maybe Head if there is no one from concord already working on it.

Caroline, are you approving register on lrnsolutions.com? I did my register on last days and would be very grateful if i could have it approved.

Thanks a lot