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.

Course Platform Evaluation Report

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.