Forum .LRN Q&A: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested

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1: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested
Posted by Alfred Essa on 01/11/05 11:07 PM
The .LRN Board will be meeting next week at MIT. We are interested in getting feedback from the community on priorities for the coming year. What should be our focus? What areas need attention? What opportunities are there for improvement? Please post your comments publically here or send it privately to one of the Board members.
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2: Re: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested (response to 1)
Posted by Romas Mažeika on 01/12/05 07:28 PM
Hello,

Should inputs be related only to technical side, or everything related dotLRN?

Sorry if I will look like a newie, but it's better to stay on safe side and ask.

Romas

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3: Re: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 01/12/05 10:04 PM
Romas, probably shouldn't speak for Al, but I think he means anything. There are certainly a number of community, marketing and other aspects of .LRN that need improvement or enhancements, so I imagine Al is soliciting info for all of that.

talli

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4: Re: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested (response to 1)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 01/13/05 08:53 PM
Yes. Talli is correct. We want feedback on everything. No holds barred. Also, feel free with critiques. We need to hear from the community.
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5: Re: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested (response to 1)
Posted by Torben Brosten on 01/13/05 09:38 PM
Hopefully, this is already on the list, but in case it is not:

Making dotLRN (and the OpenACS base) more accessible to everyone[1]. This is much easier to address as a design requirement than incorporating into dotLRN as an afterthought. These publishing standards could also help make a practicing standard for creating dynamic content that includes html/xml fragments etc. and perhaps provide practical requirements for any graphing or chart packages.

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/

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6: Re: .LRN Board Meeting -- Feedback Requested (response to 1)
Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 01/17/05 03:22 AM
<h2>.LRN main areas of working might be:</h2>

1. Public Relations (PR) & Marketing (MK)
Probably you have enough good people for that, but my two cents:
a. Newsletter, about latest info of the dotlrn world (the blogger with subscription should be enough). At least a monthly "what's new" kinda post is needed. I'm pretty sure that there's is plenty of information around .LRN.
b. If we do not coherently help/drive the dotlrn.org visitors, then probably any MK effort will create a bad image. For example, what's needed:
* if you have technical questions, we redirect them to the official FAQ and/or the .LRN forum at openacs.org
* if you want to see how .LRN looks like or who's adopting it, then you go to https://openacs.org/picture/ and/or the dotlrn.org equivalent.
* if you want to know if .LRN will work better for your type of institution or course, then you go to X, etc.
c. Increase the .LRN users base, specially with professors involved on using .LRN, and promote exchange of ideas, experiences, methodologies, etc.

2. Clear road-map
While I agree that is important to know who's gonna do what and when, is not must to build a coherent long-term road-map, which in the short term (next 3-6 months) probably will be specific about items that will be released and responsabilities.

I want to stress the importance of including more packages in the "official" release, to name some of the most urgent ones:
* LORS (needs oracle version)
* Evaluation (98% ready for oracle & 100% pg)
* Wimpy Point (ready)
* Assessment (under heavy development)
* Photo-Album (ready)
* IMS Enterprise v.1.1 support (next version in development), a key feature (straightforward integration with external systems for automatic class, user and class-membership syncronization)

And its important to kindly show more of the .LRN possible horizons, for instance, making sure that in somewhere we also mention ecommerce possible integration. Plus some of the .LRN technical capabilities like RPC support.

Also, its good to see that some parts of the proposed releases at
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=207956
are already done!

A really important suggestion is to emphasize the "Simulation" possibilities that .LRN offers, where you can develop applications that easily integrates into the .LRN framework and those simulation applications (packages) can bring the learning process to a greater level, for specialized environments. For instance, the project-manager has that potential.

Finally, an easy way to test the system, therefore, automatic installers, for windows and for linux are required to be released with each official .LRN release, the same for the knoppix CD. And of course keep promoting the .LRN official online demo website (http://dotlrndemo.galileo.edu/)