uPortal integration makes excellent sense and has been talked about before, in fact I believe Dan Wistrom did a feasiblity study for Sloan at one point, didn't he? Exploring integration has never been controversial ... but it's not been a priority for .LRN funders thus far. Maybe because of the rise of Sakai?
Michael, sure, integrating LORS as you describe might be a quick way to make that functionality available to a school, and might be relatively simple. But, what would it mean? In our thinking, LORS is not an end of itself, but rather a means to a end - importing/exporting class content. What is really the point of this if you don't have full integration of the community features of the underlying engine? I believe the kind of integration that would be acceptable to a school using Sakai would be to use our LORS as a front-end to import that content into their datamodel in Oracle.
Let's accept your opinion that doing this would be easier than writing a Sakai module to do the same ... what would be the result?
Inevitably, given the difficulty of maintaining multi-technology installations and given the religious beliefs, NIH syndrome, and the general emotional ownership psychology that comes from organizing, funding and being part of a large software engineering project ...
Such a solution would be viewed as being interim, only.
And what would be the advantage to .LRN of that? "We're the interim solution for LORS, foo and bar for Sakai schools that they plan to throw into the dustbin ASAP". I don't see that as a strong marketing message.
Underlying your posts lies the message that we've already lost the battle unless we graft ourselves onto Sakai's coattails somehow. If that's true ... what's the point of the battle? We could move on and concentrate on OpenACS proper.
Or those most interested in the e-learning platform could move on and become Sakai studs rather than beat the .LRN dead horse - I'm confident of my own ability to compete in any arena, after all. Of course it's not REALLY an open source project so perhaps we'd not be allowed in the front door :)
Now the funny thing is that .LRN is actually in a very interesting place. We have resources. We're not dead, yet. If we're dead in the US ... it's a big world out there.
A new non-profit's up and running and is funding some development. We have the e-lane project, funded by the EU (though not at Sakai levels of course).
Of course a major point to be made is that my opinion doesn't really count much, here. It's the .LRN board that should be addressing issues like this. You should probably consider writing an open letter to the board for their consideration (I'm not a .LRN board member).
