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

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.