e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: dotLRN

  • The Portal is the Platform, Part II

    This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

    Ben Brophy raised an important point in his comment on my last post in this series regarding the different ways in which portals can be used with an application. As he points out, My Yahoo! just provides windows to external applications , while some other portals actually pull the entire applications into the portal itself. To be clear, I favor the latter approach over the former for LMOS designs. In other words, an LMOS should not just have a portal; it should essentially be a portal. There are a variety of technical, cultural, and usability reasons for this, some of which I won’t get into in this post, but the main one is related to the history of LMS design and why I think they generally have sucked so badly for so long. (more…)

  • Huge dotLRN Installation

    Spain’s The Universidad Nacional de Educaci�n a Distancia (UNED) is moving 200,000 students to dotLRN. As far as I know, this will be easily the biggest rollout of a FOSS LMS on the planet. Congrats to the dotLRN community.

  • Enterprise vs. Internet World Views in Educational Tool Design

    There’s an excellent (albeit necessarily technical) conversation about implementing OKI (which are standards that, among other things, are central to the Sakai project) over at the dotLRN discussion board within the OpenACS web site. (OpenACS is an Open Source toolkit upon which the dotLRN LMS is based.) Here’s a key snippet of conversation: (more…)

  • Brilliant Discussion Board and Blog Feature

    Update: If you came here from Stephen Downes’ Online Daily post, then you were probably looking for my article on informational cascades, which you can find here.

    ***

    Last night I posted a longish comment to the OpenACS discussion boards. (OpenACS is the Open Source toolkit upon which the dotLRN course management system is based.) OpenACS, with it’s heritage as a system originally designed by Philip Greenspun to support the Photo.net knowledge-sharing community, has one of the best discussion board implementations I’ve seen. The development community keeps the big picture simple and focuses on small but usability-enhancing features.

    Well, they’ve done it again. In the process of posting, I discovered a (relatively?) new feature in the current version that I absolutely love. One of the problems with a discussion board (or blog) that supports email (or RSS) is HTML support. On a web page, there’s no reason not to support hyperlinks in posts. But many people turn off HTML in their email clients for security reasons, and escaping into HTML within an RSS feed is somewhat controversial and problematic. So how do you provide hyperlink support that degrades gracefully for non-browser clients?

    What OpenACS does is it scans your post for hyperlinks, removes those links, replaces them with footnote markers, and writes out the URLs in footnotes at the bottom of the post. On the web page, these URLs a clickable hyperlinks. But in an email message or RSS feed where the user can’t or won’t receive HTML, they still get the URLs exposed.

    Brilliant. This should be a plug-in for every blog package out there. I would gladly give up escaping into HTML within my RSS feeds if I could only find a way to send the hyperlinks without a whole lot of extra manual work on each post.

    As an aside, I highly recommend looking at dotLRN as an alternative for a CMS. It’s a bit quirky, particularly in its choice of core technologies (AOLServer, Tcl, and PostgreSQL), but in certain aspects it is far ahead of every other CMS (Open Source or not) out there.

  • Fingernails on Blackboard

    Here’s a nice informational post on the pitfalls of Blackboard as well as various Open Source and home-grown alternatives (including using blogs as an ad hoc course management system) from Kathleen Gilroy. The analogy I often make with Blackboard is to a classroom where all the seats are bolted to the floor. How the room is arranged matters. If students are going to be having a class discussion, maybe you put the chairs in a circle. If they will be doing groupwork, maybe you put them in groups. If they are doing lab work, you put them around lab tables. A good room set-up can’t make a class succeed by itself, but a bad room set-up can make it fail. If there’s a loud fan drowning out conversation or if the room is so hot that it’s hard to concentrate, you will lose students.

    A good CMS allows for flexibility in classroom set-up. For example, when I used dotLRN for a project (ironically, while working for Kathleen’s company) I was able to meet with stakeholders and try different arrangements of the virtual chairs until we found one that they were comfortable with. The default set-up, which was optimised for on-campus students who took four or five courses at once and needed an aggregation portal, was completely unsuited for my audience, which was a group of full-time bond traders and other financial services people who were taking time out of their twelve-hour work days for one course. It wasn’t worth their time to learn the complex (cluttered?) interface that made sense for a full-time college student. So we streamlined. We turned off functionality that we didn’t need. We renamed pages to fit the students’ expectations. We re-arranged portlet windows on pages and page order on the interface. We did all of this in 15 minutes without any programming.

    In Blackboard, you can’t do that. Sure, you can change the way the buttons look. And you can hide a button. But that’s it. It’s essentially only trivially configurable by the instructor. I strongly believe that this has a significant impact on distance learning drop-out rates.