[school-discuss] Open Source Learning Management System

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@objectware.no>]

fredag 25. januar 2002, 06:30, skrev Tonnesen Steve:

> I concur.  My main goal was (and remains) to promote interoperability
> between open source educational apps.  I still think this is a worthwhile
> goal.  I no longer beleive that SIF is necessarily the best route.
> Intellectual Property concerns aside, I'm starting to think that parts of
> the spec were designed with the "Keep your hands off my candy" mindset.
> It is also not possible to even discuss changes to the spec unless you are
> a paid member of SIIA.  I think we could do better.

Steve has nice thoughts here.

The School-Linux-project <URL: http://developer.skolelinux.no> in
Norway working whit a couple of developers who are designing a open
source Learning Management System.  It is already two systems that I
know of which gives this kind of services: Classroom (a Norwegian
product), and Learning Village (IBM).

The idea is to give each class a study path with links up, and takes
care of electronic learning material (I'm sorry for my lousy
English). It wold take care of copy-right protected material in a
secure way, but also link in material made by the pupils, teachers or
other contributers. You can select different views, keep other persons
or groups out, and track mandatory school-work, send email with
notifications, reminder of tests and so on.


The design is four subsystems. 

1. The learning path
2. The XML repository for learning material 
   (text, pictures, film and sound)
3. Directory-services for users of LMS
4. Meta-search-database for retrieving learning material

The whole ting is programmed in Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and can run
with Open Source application servers, and databases as Tomcat, JBoss,
and MySql. The user-interface is web-alized + a industrial standard
Model View Controller between the view-layer, and the business
layer. Then you can decouple the view to other cinds of viewers, as
SOAP, MQ, Swing - what ever. It can run on both open source-platforms
and Windows, and all of the code from deployment-scripts to run-time
code will be open source.

We shall try to translate the design-specifications to English as soon
as possible, but my time is limited, and next week we are summoning a
School-Linux developer conference with around 30 participants. This is
important to reach our release data in late March.

Sincerely

Knut Yrvin
project leader Skolelinux