As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be updated. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.
Evaluation Criteria
List criteria with details
List criteria with details and descriptions
Student's Environment | |
Student's Environment | |
Ease of Use | The students can use the environment like common web pages: page URLs can be bookmarked, copied and pasted to email messages and used by fellow students. Other common browser functions are supported: print current page, save page on local disk, find word in current page. |
Compliant with common web technology | The platform is compatible with common browsers (Netscape, Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, ICab) on common hardware ( PCs, Web tablets, set-top boxes, mobile devices etc.). |
Functional environment | |
Tutoring and Didactics | |
Ease of use | Tutors are typically advanced students, teaching assistants or – more rarely – professors. They should have attended a 1-day introductory, didactically focused teletutoring course. They don't have much time to get used to a platform, but they still should be able to quickly handle its basic tutoring tools: communications, announcements, students subscriptions, group management, tracking data evaluation and quiz results evaluation |
Communication | The platform focuses on asynchronous communications, mainly threaded discussion forums. The system also features asynchronous teamworking tools with document exchange facilities. It furthermore allows the tutor to define in a flexible way collaborative working tasks and groups. |
Students management | The platform allows complementary ways to enroll students: enrollment by tutor with web-interface, upload of student lists, by the administrator (and less importantly, self enrollment). The same holds for the definition of working groups. |
Activity tracking | The platform generates useful reports about the activity of students in the course, the quizzes and the communication tools. The purpose of the reports is to give the tutor a didactically relevant feeling of what happens in a course. |
Course Developement | |
Ease of Use | Authors are experts of the course domain. They usually are experienced web users and highly motivated, but only have basic web authoring skills. The platform should on the one hand enable the authors to efficiently develop a course structure along with its content, and on the other hand support them in being compliant with technical, didactical and usability standards in other words, it should prevent them from making severe errors. The platform by default offers a generic course organization and a navigation scheme. It is therefore easy to develop content out-of-the-box in an efficient way. |
Flexible Development Framework | Experienced power-authors have the possibility to go beyond these default functionalities. They can program dynamic pages (using server-side scripting), attach them to databases and access to platform functions with a documented API. |
Developers support | Availability of documentation. The platform producer runs a website that includes a “developers corner” with rich information (guides, tutorials, HowTos, references) and discussion forums. The producer answers promptly to support requests and bug reports. |
Compatibility with common web authoring tools | The platform is compatible with standard web authoring tools like GoLive or Dreamweaver. Content can be up-/downloaded via FTP or WebDAV for collaborative authoring or with similar methods. |
Assessment | |
Support for e-learning standards | Among the many upcoming standards for e-learning, it turns out, that the IMS and SCORM standards suite are widely accepted in the domain of higher education. The most important parts are IMS/SCORM-CP, SCORM-RTI and IMS-QTI. With data standards, implementations should support import and export. Also important is IEEE-LOM or IMS-metadata support. The main purpose of using standards is reusability and interoperability. |
Adaptable look-and-feel | it should be possible to customize the general appearance of the course platform: a default layout would be provided, that could be adapted by each institution and/or each course, if desired. In the simplest case, this could be done with cascading stylesheets: a global default stylesheet can be partially overridden by an institutional stylesheet which can itself be partially overridden by a course-specific stylesheet |
Multilinguality | One course can be offered in different translations. The navigation language can be changed by the authors and/or the students. |
XML support | The platform can handle XHTML and content of XML applications like for example LMML. The XML content is formatted with user defined XSL stylesheets. The platform contains an XSLT and an XSL-FO engine. |
Migration of current WebCT courses | About 70% of the currently developed SVC courses are using the WebCT 3.x platform. A new WBC platform should allow to migrate the static content of a WebCT 3.x course, including course structure, course content, quizzes, syllabus, glossary. The migration of live course data like forum discussions, student records, tracking data, is not required. An estimation of migration costs should also be provided. |
System & Administration | |
System management | |
Administration | |
Flexible Licensing Model | |
Technical Architecture | |