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 3.5

Qualilearning/Luvit AB: http://www.qualilearning.com

Last major evaluation update: Jan '03

strong points

  • Nice menu based interface (but non-standard!)
  • Some interesting didactical functions: feedback on each document, completed status for documents
  • Powerful rights systems (students can for instance be allowed to place documents in the course navigation tree)
  • Good statistics on course usage
  • Support for some e-learning specifications (IMS CP and QTI, AICC).

weaknesses

  • No font scaling
  • Frame based display and lack of browser toolbars give rise to usability problems, e.g. no bookmarking is possible.
  • No WebDAV or ftp support for file upload
  • No search function
  • No information on the following items:
    • Problems with zip archives: paths, style sheets (this problem should be solved with next release).
    • Limited online support (no knowledge base or newsgroups)
    • Limited system extensibility

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
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Functional environment
LUVIT provides several useful tools and functionalities:
  • Students can mark multiple documents, and then download them in a single operation.
  • Students can give feedback on any element in a course. By default, feedback is transmitted to course adminstrators and instructors, but the author of a document can also specify additional persons or groups that will receive feedback (this could for instance be used for groupwork).
  • At the bottom of each element in a course, there is a "Completed" checkbox that the student can select. He/she can the later view the completed status of each element with the "Progress" tool, and the instructor can also create create statistics based on the completed status of course elements.
  • All the users currently online are shown on the course homepage.
  • Users can choose to have a report on activity in a course (new forum postings, new published documents, etc.) sent to them by email.

Some limitations:

  • There is no internal search functionality.
  • The help system is not context sensitive. Still, it's quite useful as it provides a table of contents with direct access to entries, and a keyword index.
  • Some useful tools are missing, such as a glossary or annotations by students.
  • Only instructors can post events in the agenda, not students (no personal agenda or calendar).

Tutoring and Didactics

Ease of use
Tutoring tools are fairly easy to use in LUVIT. Tutors can, among others:
  • monitor the progression of students (also using the statistics tools)
  • give grades to students
  • view recent activity
  • create announcements
  • read the feedbacks given by students on specific course pages
  • work with groups of students

On the didactical side, LUVIT provides several interesting features:

  • For each module in the navigation tree (= course structure), authors can specify permissions for viewing, editing (with version handling), approving and feedback for any user (e.g. students or groups of students). This means that students can also place various types of objects in the navigation tree. This could for instance be used by students working in groups on a common project: each group could have a private zone for posting documents and discussion, automatically receiving feedback from other members of the group, revising a common document, etc. Later, the final version of the students' documents could be made available to the whole class.
  • Authors can set an expiration date for documents. Using the "Expiring documents" functions, students can then easily check which documents they should read next.
Communication
LUVIT provides only basic communication tools:
  • Threaded discussion forums
  • Internal mail
  • Instant messages to other online users
  • Web-based chat (refresh time: 15 seconds).
All types of users, including students, can create forums (as well as chats).
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:
  • number of hits on documents
  • students' progression
  • unopened/initiated/finished(=completed) documents
  • number of published documents (useful, since students can also publish documents in a course)
  • last access to objects/by person
  • test results
  • grading
  • time online

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:
  • The new quiz tool offers various types of questions: multiple choice (these can also be imported from a text file), hotspot (user must click on a zone in an image), matching, numeric, and fill in the blank. Images, sounds and movies can be included in questions. Quizzes can be graded or taken as self-tests.
    Questions for quizzes are stored in a question bank, and import and export of quizzes is possible in IMS QTI format.
    An interesting feature of quizzes is that a user can be automatically placed in a specific group once he/she has passed the quiz. Since documents permissions can also be specified for groups, this allows the teacher to make some parts of the course available to students according to their quiz results.
  • Open answer questions are also offered as a separate tools. They can be used for essays and similar kinds of assignments. Open answers questions are marked by the instructor.
  • A separate "eVal" tool can be used for other types of evaluations (according to the manual: "course evaluations, inquiries, questionnaires, or enquiries about prerequisites, expectations, prior/previous knowledge, and available equipment"). Evaluations can contain grading, alternatives and free text questions.
All these tools provide various options for marking, taking the assessment multiple times, etc.

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
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Administration
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Flexible Licensing Model
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Technical Architecture
Windows based server, using "asp" and COM technology.