I am very casual reader of this board, so i want to
apologize for a late response. We (the vienna university
of economics and business administration) are developing a
university learning platform based on OACS 4.*
and XOTcl which is scheduled to be launched this
October.
For our project we hired about 38 people
(34 content-developer, 2 technical people, 2 didactical
people) to develop a fully-covered curriculum of all
courses in the first year (we are a business school,
the courses are ranging from law over mathematics
over IS to marketing, economics, etc). About 2000
students will enroll in the following year these
courses.
What we did so far is more-or-less orthogonal
to .LRN since we focussed in the first phase of the
project on content creation and content
classification tools and automatic linkage of related
resources.
Roughly speaking,
we developed a series of XML-Schemata to describe learning
resources together with some support for uploading and
process according XML files (with tDOM) and feed them
into the content repository. These learning resources
are e.g. six different types of tests (like multiple-choice
tests, etc), text-books, glossary etc. together with some
important meta-data (like categorization, etc.). To produce
the XML-schema instances, we developed support for MS-Word,
where one can use style-sheets (.dot files) and some helper
functions in some ms* user friendly way. Those, who do not
want to use word use at our university plain XML.
XOTcl was quite handy in this process since it allows
for better encapulation of context information, reuse
of methods, definition of specialized methods, etc.
(these are pretty much the standard OO arguments,
for deeper discussion of XOTcl features and properties,
see http://www.xotcl.org with its publication section)
As being one of the XOTcl core developers, i am
certainly biased. Hoever, most of our development work
on the server-side is done by Peter Alberer, who
startet this project with no XOTcl background.
sorry for being a bit lengthy
-gustaf
