Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: interesting chat about moodle / .LRN

Collapse
Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on
Caroline,

I agree, its not about trying to get the market other already has, is about minimal things the interested and active parties should do to make the things happen, like:
- governance
- publicity

But I have to say that all the investment seems to go in code, and even worse, in different code that is not a final product, nor easy to try / test, etc.

As Al mention, what we need is organize efforts toward a common goal, a put effort / time / resources to actually do things, but none manage this with enough time to drive the whole project areas.

BTW, we have a windows installer, easy to update for further releases ...
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=349832

Collapse
Posted by Miguel on
Hello all.
I'm actually new to .LRN and some people at my work asked me
to make an evaluation of this platform. I'm not making any
comparisons with other aplications, but I wanted to share my
point of view, since after reading this posts I'm not feeling that alone :)

I agree with the last comments, mainly about the lack of a
mature community and support. If I learned something about
the open source software is that any project of this nature
that do not have a community behind it, is destined to
fail...or to be used by only a very limited number of
people.

About de installation issues, I'm no rocket scientist, but
I'm a computer science engineer, so I have some experience
in different computer systems (open source and commercial)
both using and developing them. Even with my previous
experience I have to say that installing this system was no
"picnic" at all. Let me explain; one thing is installing and
accessing it (with can be done relatively fast with the
instalation notes)...but other thing is get the different
modules and packages to be available and working fine...
this is what had take me most of the time, because I had to find
out by myself most of the answers to my questions.

When searching the forums about questions concerning the
instalation of certain modules, or bugs, etc. I realized
that most of the posts are like from one year ago...And that
aren't answered. This lead me to think "maybe I'm looking in
the wrong place"...but even with a google search the results
were the same. I don't know if you have this feeling, maybe
it's just me, but looking back all the things that I've done
the past month (when I started with this project) always
hits me the feeling of "is it me? (because nobody else seems
to have the problems I have) or no one is really using this
platform?".

Anyway if you ask me now, I'm not so sure that this system
is something I would recommend to anybody outside the
computer developer's community (if)...hope that this change
in the next few months that I have to work with this
project.

Hope I'm not offending anybody, and if someone think that I'm wrong about all these, please point
me in the right direction.

Thanks.
Miguel.

Collapse
Posted by Caroline Meeks on
We have a consistent issue with installation problems and other challenges for potential users trying to evaluate .LRN.

The person above felt there was no support, which is odd considering that there are commercial vendors.

I know the communtity is constantly working on better installation, I suggest that in addition to that work the .LRN consortium considers allowing vendors such as Solution Grove, Zill, Viaro etc. to advertize on the download page on dotlrn.org.

we should consider that looking more comercial, especially in the download area can help adoption of .LEN. The larger organizations with resources will hopefully choose to get some help with evaluation. Smaller users who want to do it themselves, will feel good about "saving money".