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Course Platform Evaluation Report

show details | show criteria descriptions

Products

dotLRN 2.2

OpenACS consortium: http://dotlrn.org/
Started at MIT, now a non-profit consortium with members at a number of universities and companies around the world. Members pay a fee to participate in the OpenACS consortium, but anybody who fulfills the requirements can become certified and contribute.
Last major evaluation update: September 2005

About product
Based on OpenACS (an open source toolkit), dotLRN consists of a set of components that are certified by the dotLRN consortium to be dotLRN compliant.

About producer
Started at MIT, now a non-profit consortium with members at a number of universities and companies around the world. Members pay a fee to participate in the OpenACS consortium, but anybody who fulfills the requirements can become certified and contribute.

Strengths
Strong on collaboration and community learning through a number of nice features such as RSS feeds, email and SMS notification, survey, IM chat, polling, blog and FAQ. Also offers most current functions such as homework drop box, assessment, content organisation and Scorm display. Advanced features include export of student tracking data and exchange of learning objects (entire course or just parts).

Weaknesses
The platform is a combination of OpenACS modules from different developers from different phases of development, which results in a heterogenious interface and inconsistent quality. Content presentation is distributed over 3 different tools, which makes it difficult to find some of the more powerful features. Some modules have context sensitive help, some not. Not all modules are available in all languages.

General
Multilinguality
English, German, French, Spanish is availble. An editor that allows easy addition of other languages is provided. Only certain modules are available in Italian. The German version has some strange translations.

Student's Environment
Ease of Use
dotLRN is easy to use. Students can use dotLRN mostly in the same way as common web pages but should not trust the common browser functions to always work properly. Page reload and bookmarking do not always work correctly.
Compliant with common web technology
Yes, commonly used browsers are supported.
Functional environment
Many tools that are especially useful for collaboration are provided: RSS feeds, email and SMS notification, survey, polling, blog, FAQ, IM chat and synchronization of calendar events with Microsoft Outlook calendars. Context sensitive help is only implemented in some of the modules, the assessment tool has few exercise types.

Tutoring and Didactics
Ease of use
The user interface for students is quite easy to learn and understand quickly. It is less easy for teachers, although a number of tools such as news, FAQ, groups, forum and the calendar do help to rapidly set up a course. Some functions, however, are difficult to find and not always where you would expect to find them. The student tracking and the number of exercise generators provided in the assessment are quite limited.
Communication
The platform clearly has been developed with community learning in mind. Many communication tools (news, RSS feeds, IM chat, subscription to alert mails, etc.) have current functions allowing individual and groups to work comfortably together. A mailing system is not integrated (bulk mail is provided). A flexible rights management system allows students to create their own groups and forums.
Student management
Yes, there are several ways to enroll students: interface to IMS Enterprise, load students from an LDAP directory, lists in CSV format.
Activity tracking
Tracking and reporting is rather limited, but some feedback is provided.

Course Development
Ease of Use
dotLRN provides very many functions and tools, but does not really help guide the teachers and developers with structuring tools and wizards. It's 'hidden' curriculum favors cooperative learning over text reading and can be set up quickly to accompany a face to face course. Creating a more complete learning environment requires several training workshops.
Flexible Development Framework
Yes, server side scripting (PHP, ASP, ColdFusion and also exchange with SOAP and XML RPC), connecting to databases. An API is available: http://demo.cognovis.de:8030/api-doc/
Developers support
Well documented developers community site for the core system OpenACS: http://openacs.org/doc/. The dotLRN subgroup is much less well documented.
Compatibility with common web authoring tools
Yes to all
Assessment
Not many different test types, mainly multiple choice questions and surveys.
Support for e-learning standards
SCORM as well as IMS CP is supported (single pages of imported SCORM packages can be edited inside dotLRN). IMS-QTI is used to exchange assessments.
Adaptable look and feel
For the teacher/developer adapting the layout of the interface is limited to changing some colors, turning on or off some tools and moving links up or down. Logos and style sheets can be only be changed at the server level by specialists. At the server level, multiple, differently branded institutions are possible. The "ETP" tool (Edit this page) is hard to find, yet allows the experienced developer to more adapt the general appearance of the courses' main pages more completely.

System & Administration
System management
A large installation can use one database computer (PostgreSQL, Oracle) with two web servers for loadbalancing.
Administration
One installation of dotLRN cannot serve several institutions. Since OpenACS is prepared for this, very little is needed to improve dotLRN in that direction. Authentication modes: Unix Pluggable Authentication Modules allowing (PAM RADIUS, Kerberos, IMAP, POP, AFS, etc.) and LDAP. The external authentication infrastructure is modular so that additional authentication drivers can be easily added.