Tom Hoffman wrote: > > Don't forget SchoolBell, which is a Zope 3 based calendar server: > http://schooltool.org/schoolbell > > It's a part of SchoolTool, which is a Z3 based school administration > framework under development with funding from the Shuttleworth > Foundation. > > SchoolTool + ECMS should equal a killer eLearning or ePortfolio > platform someday. hm... my understanding is that Schooltool is geared at replacing existing administrative systems, or perhaps rather providing adminsitrative tools whe none exist. http://www.schooltool.org/about/vision Possibly also primarily geared to basic school and not Higher Education (not sure about this last statement, but this is the impression I get from reading the site). This brings me to clarify my motivation behind producing reusable components. My interest in Zope lies primarily in building OpenSource LMS, elearning and portfolio software for the higher education market. Five years ago I got involved in a large project involving the production of our Student Portal (student.chalmers.se). I chose Zope because it suited our needs best at the time (RAD, easy deployment, power without requiring huge amounts of manpower). My vision was, and is still, to provide all the necessary infrastructure and tools for educators to build their courseware, manage their courses and support creativity in the process, using reusable basic components. The power in the system will not come from ready-made static solutions but from the way the combination of components produce powefull solutions. Think Lego building blocks, OpenDoc Style ;-) In doing this, I need to be able to integrate, not replace, with existing administrative infrastructure. this paper http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/fall53/paulsen53.html while not covering all the truth, gives an overview of the LMS situation in the nordic countries. There is also an current project being undertaken ion Sweden that is researching the possibilities of using opensource LMS and possible try to reach concensus on which LMS to use nationwide. Most of the LMS that I and some former colleagues have experience with (we are tehcnicians, not educators) lack in some functionality or another. What we see when we analyse the needs expressed by users (teachers mostly, then students and administrators, in that order) is that after the first excitement over the pretty screeshots and slick GUIs has passed, there is a period of slowly growing frustration with the limitations in each system, ranging from the "wasn't as intuitive as we hoped" to "why is this not better integrated with our administrative systems and other IT-infrastructure". Also some of them are surprisingly hard to administer. Finally, most of them are severely lacking in support for content management and workflow. So, to finally summarise my view of the connection of ECM, ShcoolTool and reusable components with LMS/elearning. Zope2 was not what I expected it to be - it was better than the competition, but it turned out that it is very hard to build reusable components the way I envisioned it. Fortuantely, Zope3 seems to overcome many, perhaps most of the obstacles in Zope2. I think that if the z3lab project succeds in producing reasonably reusable components that form the basis of ECM, then the very same components can be used in an LMS/eLearning product. Liklewise, if SchoolTool produces reusable components in a similar way, they can also be used to produce this ultimate LMS/eLearning product. At the very least, SchooTool may be used as definer of generic interfaces that are needed to integrate administrative systems into LMS/eLearning product, and perhaps even ECM (I boldly assume that ECM is going to use existing Enterprise Directory Systems and Enterprise Authentication/Authorisation Systems if they exist :-). I do understand that the above lies in the future after ECM has emerged as a product. However, I believe that it is important to have all these various isues in mind so that we really do produce ECM reusable components as part of the basic infrastructure, to whatever extent is possible given deadlines, economical constraints, etc. /dario -- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech. "...and click? damn, I need to kill -9 Word again..." - b using macosx
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