Re: [school-discuss] Open-source alternatives

[troy banther <troy@banther-trx.homeunix.com>]

I have been running Plato Pathways for four years now. 

The emphasis is on ABE, ESL, developmental, and early academic. I cannot
speak for high school or four-year higher institutions. 

Nor, I cannot speak for a study done in the 70s when the early PLATO
people controlled the software or for early computers and networking.

We recently had a Ph.D. from Albuquerque study our learning environment.

I will get his name and the name of the study when I return to work on
Monday.

He noted three things from the populations: People learn at a higher
rate with an instructor; People learn less with just computer delivered
instruction; and People learn well when both an instructor and computer
delivered instruction are combigned.

The college here chose PLATO over CCC. CCC was later purchased by TRO as
was Academic Systems.

That is not really the reason why I mentioned it. I would like to see
and obtain an open source version or like version to replace PLATO.

I have been operating my PLATO labs without the $6,000 support agreement
for almost two years now due to fiscal issues in the state ABE grant-
funded program I am assigned to to technically assist.

http://banther-trx.homeunix.com/school/main.lab.png

http://banther-trx.homeunix.com/school/rm170.png

There are those who like to use the CDI and those who don't. There are
those that feel comfortable with computers and those who don't. There
are times when we have good spikes in traffic and then lulls - mostly in
the summer sessions. There are instructors who use it like the English
and Math instructors that don't. I am just a tech and I only observe
what the PLATO internal reports and visual observations of the lab.

 

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 20:20 -0700, Michael Dean wrote:
> Yes, this is the same (possibly modernized for browser delivery) Plato 
> software I evaluated at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium 
> in the late 70's!  Then the software didn't work, and my investigations 
> of more contemporary evaluations came to the same conclusion!  If I 
> recall, then students lost 10 months of math achievement over what they 
> would have accomplished with just a teacher!  This is in contrast to 
> CCC, where theirdrill and practice modules caused students to gain 18 
> months!  A two year gap! 
> 
> troy@banther-trx.homeunix.com wrote:
> 
> >
> > Try www.plato.com
> >
> >
-- 
...     troy banther, b.s. (squared)
...     http://banther-trx.homeunix.com
...     slackware linux user and vegan