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.
LMS Evaluation Report
show details | show criteria descriptions
| Products | Qualilearning/Luvit 3.5Qualilearning/Luvit AB: http://www.qualilearning.comLast major evaluation update: Jan '03 strong points
weaknesses
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Student's Environment | ||
Student's Environment | ||
Ease of Use | When a user enters a course, a new browser window is opened. The original browser menus and toolbars are hidden and LUVIT provides its own menus. In fact, the course platform appears as if it were a standalone application (not browser based). This gives rise to several problems: many of the functions that users normally perform in web pages cannot be used, e.g. bookmarking, printing, font scaling, etc. (except via keyboard shortcuts). More generally, the user loses the familiar context of his/her browser's menus and toolbars.
On the other end, once the user gets familiarized with it, the application's popup-menus make it quite usable, and most functions can be accessed quite rapidly in one or two clicks (but it wouldn't be less usable if the browser's menus and toolbars were shown!). Also, the display uses many frames (which would make bookmarking and printing even more difficult, if these functions were accessible!). The navigation frame on the left has a fixed width, which makes reading items sometimes difficult, withouth any possibility to scale the font size (at least, the navigation tree can be displayed in a resizable separate window). | |
Compliant with common web technology | - | |
Functional environment | LUVIT provides several useful tools and functionalities:
Some limitations:
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Tutoring and Didactics | ||
Ease of use | Tutoring tools are fairly easy to use in LUVIT. Tutors can, among others:
On the didactical side, LUVIT provides several interesting features:
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Communication | LUVIT provides only basic communication tools:
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Students management | Upload of lists of students (by administrators) is possible. Integration with LDAP and Active Directory is planned for spring (according to Qualilearning). | |
Activity tracking | LUVIT provides many different statistics on the activity in a course:
According to the type of statistics, detailed results can be obtained for each object (document, module, forum), person, group, etc. Statistics are displayed as values and graphics, both of which can be exported to a file. | |
Course Developement | ||
Ease of Use | A LUVIT course is structured as a hierarchical structure (the "navigation tree"). Any type of object (document, forum, quiz) can be placed anywhere in this structure. This is done in two steps: the object is first uploaded in the author's "My Archive" zone, and then published in the navigation tree (the same document can be published in different locations in the navigation tree).
A package (a collection of HTML documents and pictures, flash files, etc.) can be uploaded as a zip archive. The user can then choose one document as entry point and place it in the navigation tree (in this case, internal navigation between the documents must be provided by the course author). But there are some problems with zip archives: style sheets don't work, and Flash animations cannot load data from external files. Also, the use of zip archives means that updating an individual requires re-uploading the whole archive. Alternately, all HTML documents in the zip archive can be placed in the navigation tree, but this has to be done manually. Deletion of multiple documents is cumbersome: the author must manually confirm the deletion of each document. | |
Flexible Development Framework | A SDK to expand the functionality of the system should be available to LUVIT partners in the future (no release date yet). | |
Developers support | LUVIT has no web site for users and course developers (a helpdesk is currently under development). | |
Compatibility with common web authoring tools | Luvit provides no ftp or WebDAV support. Instead, files must be individually uploaded through a form (multiple upload, which was available previously, has been removed). | |
Assessment | There are different types of assessments and quizzes in LUVIT:
There is also an another (older) tool that can be used for simple multiple choice quizzes, but with the new quiz tool, it is no longer very useful. | |
Support for e-learning standards | LUVIT currently supports import of AICC course files and IMS Content Packaging 1.1 (but there are some pitfalls to avoid), as well as IMS QTI. | |
Adaptable look-and-feel | EMPTY"Skins" can be defined (at the administrative level) which specify the look and feel of a course. A skin can then be selected by the course author. Apart from that, an author cannot change the appearance of a course. | |
Multilinguality | LUVIT provides support for several languages, including French, German, Italian and English. Users can select the interface language at the portal and course level, and authors can also specify a default language for their course. | |
XML support | - | |
Migration of current WebCT courses | Migration path for WebCT courses is planned for spring. | |
System & Administration | ||
System management | - | |
Administration | - | |
Flexible Licensing Model | - | |
Technical Architecture | Windows based server, using "asp" and COM technology. | |
