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Course Platform Evaluation Report

show details | show criteria descriptions

Products

OLAT 3.2

University of Zurich: http://www.olat.org
The development of OLAT is led and funded mainly by the University of Zürich (Switzerland). Official support for OLAT is available at the Multimedia & e-Learning Center www.id.unizh.ch/mels for Swiss university members. Commercial support is available through goodsolutions.
Last major evaluation update: September 2005

About product
OLAT initially started as a student project at the University of Zürich in the year 1999. OLAT was the winner of the medida prix http://www.medidaprix.org/ and was then consolidated as a university project.

About producer
The development of OLAT is led and funded mainly by the University of Zürich (Switzerland). Official support for OLAT is available at the Multimedia & e-Learning Center www.id.unizh.ch/mels for Swiss university members. Commercial support is available through goodsolutions.

Strengths

  • Intuitive to use for course authors and students
  • Any user can create ad-hoc working groups with common file storage, discussion forum, chat, mail and announcement tools.
  • Completely frame-free design.
  • The look-and-feel is CSS controlled, and widely customizable.
  • Clean and well documented technical architecture.
  • Professional services are available from the company goodsolutions GmbH.

Weaknesses

  • No tool to search for keywords in course content and discussion forums
  • Browser bookmarks and browser back button don't work.
  • Rather small contributing community and just a handful of productive installations.
  • Lack of API's or plugin interfaces. To extend the system the original source code has to be modified.

General
Multilinguality
Available languages: German, French, Italian, English. It is up to the students to configure their preferred language in the personal settings. Help files are not available in all languages.

Student's Environment
Ease of Use
The student's environment is intuitive, nice looking and easy to use. Drawbacks: Some very common browser functionalities (back-button, browser bookmarks) don't work.

Some users may have difficulty understanding the different types of content links (catalogue, courses, learning resources).

Compliant with common web technology
Olat has been designed to work with all important web browsers running on any operating system. During the test, no severe browser incompatibilities or style sheet issues were observed.
Functional environment
Nice:
  • Students can create their own ad-hoc working groups (buddygroups), and decide who can be a member (by invitation). Tools in a buddygroup: announcements, send e-mail to members, shared document folder, discussion forum, text chat.
  • Shared document folders are available on a course or group level. Students can subscribe to a folder to be notified of changes. Files can be hierarchically organized, moved, copied, up-/downloaded, zipped and unzipped. Files can be accessed through web up/download or through WebDAV.
  • Private document folders are available.
  • Other available tools: student annotations, surveys, assignments, selective release of content.
Missing:
  • Full text search tool (that searches at least in content pages and the discussion forum)
  • Calendar tool

Tutoring and Didactics
Ease of use
The tutoring environment is easy and intuitive to use. A short training session will be sufficient to get the tutors started.
Communication
The most important communication tools are available.

Basic forum functionalities:
Supported: very basic wiki-like formatting (url, bold, italic, smileys), thread sorting by various criteria, email notification on forum level.
Not supported: attachments (workaround shared folder), advanced formatting like lists, math formulas, view all message bodies in a thread at once.

Student management
Students usually enroll themselves. The course visibility can public, or defined very specifically with boolean expressions.
Activity tracking
There is no online graphical or statistical evaluation tool. Very detailed evaluations can be done manually by downloading the class access log file, and evaluating it using a spreadsheet or a statistics tool.

Course Development
Ease of Use
Designing a course and adding content is relatively easy. There's a built-in JavaScript based HTML editor, that allows to create and edit simple HTML pages. Pre-existing HTML pages can be uploaded and reused without modifications.
  • Linking to any content page or tool in a course is possible, even from external websites.
Flexible Development Framework
Basically, content pages are static HTML pages. If more dynamic and intelligent content is needed, OLAT allows to tunnel through an external website, and display it's content in the Olat content pane. With tunneling, virtually any content can be visually seamlessly integrated in an Olat course. The drawbacks of tunneling is that the course authors have to handle static and dynamic content differently, and that external web servers need to be set up and maintained.
Developers support
The system is well documented, and developers usually provide answers to support requests within hours.
Compatibility with common web authoring tools
Standard HTML content can be uploaded and used in a course. All local references to media files and other html pages work.

Problems:

  • The Olat navigation is not properly updated, when clicking on links between local html pages.
  • Local css might conflict with system css.
  • Background images in local css don't work.
Assessment
The testing environment only offers 2 question types: multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank tests. However, the multiple-choice editor/engine is very flexible and allows to set many attributes and settings: visual appearance, possible number of attempts, time limitations, randomizations, hints, correct solutions or specific feedback.

There is no API that allows to extend the assessment engine with new question types (extension needs to be done in the source code).

Support for e-learning standards
IMS-CP and IMS-QTI import supported. IMS-CP can also be exported. SCORM support is finished and will be officially released in Sept '05.
Adaptable look and feel
The layout and look-and-feel can be adapted by applying a custom CSS.

System & Administration
System management
Based on scalable J2EE servlet architecture
Administration
No virtual servers possible on a single installation. A complete technical documentation is available online http://www.olat.org/docu/