Hey Everyone,
I hope you all had a really good time in Copenhagen 😊
We are really pleased to hear that a discussion about how to market OpenACS/dotLRN has began at the meeting in there. With Rafael, about some months back we started collecting case studies from higher education institutions currently using ACS/ACES and dotLRN.On our first attempt we contacted Al (MIT), Caroline (MIT), Carl (Heidelberg), John (Cambridge) and Emmanualle (UNED, Spain) to start putting together some case studies. It took some time, but Carl helped us a lot to get the ball rolling. In addition, we added a conceptual analysis of the dotLRN and its design. And here is the final paper, and with the permission of the collaborators, we submitted for AUSWEB, a major e-learning conference here in Australia to contribute to the evangelization of dotLRN. Note: copies were also sent to all the collaborators, and Al insisted that the case studies would go to the dotLRN site soon.
In addition, we just finished another case study with Gustaf Neumann and Peter Alberer from Vienna University. They have put together a class A OpenACS system that suits their need just perfectly, an gives a great boost to the open source (white box) initiative. Moreover, we are currently working on two others: Galileo University -Guatemala- with Oscar Bonilla (thanks to Rocael), and Birzeit University -the first university in Palestine- with Marwan Tarazi.
We wanted the case studies to be written with the or senior management perspective, so all of the people we have written these case studies with are IT unit directors or senior project managers responsible for the implementation.
In the next few weeks, I hope we can finish another paper we have in the pipeline that summarizes the benefits of all these case studies and presents each of the, hopefully by then, eight cases in particular.
Rafa also has written a good number of papers for OpenACS (technical and also business oriented) that have been published in education and tech magazine worldwide. Here are two that I know of:
The OACS application framework. AusWEB 2002
R. A. Calvo and D. Peterson
The OpenACS e-commerce solution. System Administration Magazine. February 2003
R.A. Calvo and M. Aufflick.
As soon as we manage to finish the once we are currently working on, we will submitted to the community as well.
Thank you,
Ernie
