Hi Caroline,
I was lucky enough to be in at this conference where this paper got presented by Sabine (author). It was presented at the IEEE Learning Technologies conference (ICALT) in Taiwan in the Learning Design track.
This paper was probably the most exciting paper in the track and as you can see there it has quite a thorough analisys of features and functionalities.
However, bare in mind that the main focus of this paper is adaptability and personalisation mainly and it does an evaluation of these platforms based on them. It's *not* a functional evaluation based on pedagogical value.
After Sabine's presentation I had a spoke with her about .LRN and some of the packages that .LRN has for learning materials (survey, assessment, LORS, etc) as well as the work that the UNED fellows have been doing with Alfanet and all. Of course she was unware of all these.
I bet the ranking of .LRN would have been much better if she would have seen these packages in her out-of-the-box .LRN installation.
At any rate, I strongly agree with Caroline about looking at other platforms to enhance .LRN usability and features. In addition, it will be great to include more teachers and pedagogy people in the .LRN packages design.
It seems to me that we, in the .LRN community, tend to be good technologist, but we might not have a lot of teachers and pedagogy fellows involved in our design?
After being involved in the Moodle community for a bit, the main difference that I noticed is that their community is being driven by teachers mainly. And they have a great deal of say on the features that are to be implemented. There are 341024 teachers using Moodle according to Moodle Stats. I think that's what makes the difference for Moodle.
Ernie
