Learning Management System

Transcription

1 WDS'05 Proceedings of Contributed Papers, Part I, , ISBN MATFYZPRESS Learning Management System R. Remeš University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Agriculture, České Budějovice, Czech Republic. Abstract. Learning management system (LMS) is software that automates the administration of training. The LMS registers users, tracks courses in a catalog, records data from learners, and provides reports to management. An LMS is typically designed to handle courses by multiple publishers and providers. It usually doesn t include its own authoring capabilities, instead, it focuses on managing courses created by a variety of other sources. Introduction In my doctoral studies I occupy myself with IT supported teaching. For such purposes we use Learning Management System (LMS). LMS is software that automates the administration of training events. All LMS s manage the log-in and registration of users, manage course catalogs, record data from learners, and provide reports to management. There used to be a distinction between learning management systems and more powerful integrated learning management systems. That distinction has now disappeared. The term learning management system is now used to describe a wide range of applications that track student training and may or may not include functions such as: Authoring which means tools that offer the option of editing and saving materials in or transform documents into a Web format. Tools that produce multimedia and tools for site management or site publication, and management of layouts (e.g. CSS formatting tools). Classroom management ways of organising the resources, pupils and helpers in a classroom, so that teaching and learning can proceed in an efficient and safe manner. Competency management personal competency gap analysis. Competency management is used to identify skills, knowledge and performance. Knowledge management the distribution, access and retrieval of unstructured information about human experiences between interdependent individuals or among members of a workgroup. Certification or compliance training courses for learning from home, office or any remote location with internet access. Personalization adaptation of users based on personal details. Mentoring is designed to promote students development. By this we mean goals, schedules, training, and evaluation. Chat a system allowing real-time communication between two or more users. Discussion boards (message boards) forum provided for discussion. LMS provides students their own virtual learning environment, where they can find courses, tests or instructions how to study. They can participate in discussions on various topics or consult some subjects, that are hard to understand, as if they were in a real classroom. Commercial or open source? Nowadays there are two kinds of Learning Management Systems. First of them is commercial, and the second is free or so called open source project. I m going to concentrate on the second type which is designed for the Higher Education purposes. 207

2 ATutor REMES: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, and create themes to give ATutor a custom look and feel. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional materials, easily retrieve and import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment. Brihaspati This is an effort of Educational Technology Research Group, IIT Kanpur which aims at developing a platform-independent highly scalable content delivery tool for web-based elearning system. This software is implemented in java using Turbine, an open source framework to build secure web applications. This conforms to the Model View Controller (MVC) paradigm which aims at separating content, presentation and business logic. Development for regional Indian languages in progress. Currently used by many Indian universities and colleges. Currently this project is funded by Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Govt. of India (since November 2003) and IIT Kanpur (since August 2002). Claroline Claroline is an Open Source software based on PHP/MySQL. It s a collaborative learning environment allowing teachers or education institutions to create and administer courses through the web. The system provides group management, forums, document repositories, calendar, chat, assignment areas, links, user profile administration on a single and highly integrated package. Claroline is translated into 28 languages and used by hundreds of institutions around the world. The software was initially started by the University of Louvain (Belgium) and released under Open Source licence (GPL). Since then, a comunity of developpers around the world contributes to its development. COSE COSE (Creation of Online Study Environments) is a system which facilitates active and collaborative learning for a wide variety of learners (traditional, distributed and distance), with a particular focus on approaches such as problem-based learning and cognitive apprenticeship. COSE 2 builds on the successes of COSE, developed in part with funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), with a redesigned user interface, improved performance and improvements to the accessibility and interoperability of the software. The most significant improvement of all, of course, is in the price. As a free binary download COSE 2 is now available to FE and HE establishments and government and commercial organisations worldwide. Cambridge Software Publishing and Staffordshire University have agreed to release later versions of COSE 2 to be made available under an Open Source Licence. CourseWork CourseWork is an open source course management system, designed to provide an open, modular framework for learning objects. It uses OKI APIs whenever possible. It is written primarily in Java, using the Java servlet technology. Stanford s implementation of CourseWork runs with the Apache web server, using TomCat 4.0 for the Java servlet server. DTL (Display Template Language), developed at Stanford, is used to create the presentation displays. The database back end is Oracle. CourseWork has been run on both Sun Solaris and Linux. Other institutions have ported CourseWork to work with PostgreSQL, and is expected to be compatible with other SQL implementations as well. Using CourseWork, instructors and teaching assistants can set up a course Web site that displays announcements, on-line readings, a dynamic syllabus and schedule, on-line assignments and quizzes, a discussion forum for students, and a grade book. CourseWork is designed both for faculty with little Web experience, who can use CourseWork to develop their Web site quickly, and for expert Web-users, who can use it to organize complex, Web-based materials and link them to Web communication tools. The CourseWork source code is free and open, and can be downloaded from their site for any organization to use and modify to their own needs. 208

3 Docebo LMS REMES: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DoceboLMS is an open source e-learning platform written in php, mysql, and scorm 1.2 compliant, for distance learning developed in italy and known as Spaghettilearning, since the 2.0 version the name is changed in DoceboLMS. (In latin Docebo means I will teach ). The project is now developed by programmers located all over the world and the original team is coordinating more than 20 developers. The learning management system charateristics are: written in PHP and MySql, so it can run in Linux, Windows, Macosx and in most of the internet provider web hosting, open source, so completely free, support SCORM 1.2, the e-learning international standard, manage different learning models, from collaborative learning to self learning. Fedora Fedora is a general purpose repository service developed jointly by The University of Virginia Library and Cornell University. The Fedora project is devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems. The software demonstrates how distributed digital information management can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and web services. Fle3 Learning Environment Fle3 is a web-based software for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). It is designed to support learner and group centered work that concentrates on creating and developing expressions of knowledge (i.e. knowledge artefacts) and design. Fle3 contains three learning tools and several administration tools. Fle3 is easy to localize to different languages (all you need to do is to translate one file). Currently users may choose their user interfaces language to be Finnish, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Italian, Lithuanian, Estonian, German, Polish, Danish or Chinese. Fle3 WebTops can be used by teachers and students to store different items (documents, files, links, knowledge building notes) related to their studies, organize them to folders and share them with others. WebTop also includes shared course folder for each course. The same shared course folder is available in the Knowledge Building and Jamming tools as well. The items in the WebTops can be called learning objects. With Fle3 Knowledge Building tool groups may carry out knowledge building dialogues, theory building and debates by storing their thoughts into a shared database. In the Knowledge Building study group may use Knowledge Types to scaffold and structure their dialogues. The Knowledge Type sets are fully editable and one may export and import them from one Fle3 to another. Fle3 comes with two default Knowledge Type sets: Progressive Inquiry, and Design Thinking. Fle3 Jamming tool is a shared space for collaborative construction of digital artefacts (pictures, text, audio, video). A study group may work together with some digital artefacts by simply uploading and downloading files. Versions are tracked automatically and different versions are displayed graphically. Jamming can be used for many kind of collaborative work requiring versioning. For teachers and administrators Fle3 offers tools to manage users and courses, and study projects. The administrator may also export and import courses or the fully content of the Fle3 database in XML format (compatible with the Educational Modelling Language EML). Fle3 is a Zope product, written in Python. Zope and Fle3 run on almost all Operating Systems (GNU/Linux, MacOS X, *BSD, etc.) and Microsoft Windows. ILIAS The web-based learning management system ILIAS is available as open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Universities, educational institutions and every interested person may use the system free of charge and contribute to its further development. ILIAS has a very big worldwide user and developer community. The software development worldwide is coordinated by team at the Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne. 209

4 REMES: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ILIAS allows users to create, edit and publish learning and teaching material in an integrated system with their normal web browsers. Tools for cooperative working and communication are included as well. I-Study This is an open source platform based on PHPBB Forum dealing with actual didactical aspects for cooperative learning. The platform supports English and German speaking people. Tutorial and website is only in German..LRN.LRN is an open source enterprise-class suite of web applications and a portal framework for supporting course management, online communities and collaboration. Originally developed at MIT,.LRN can be used to support a range of applications, including course management, e-learning, and research communities..lrn is in use worldwide at MIT (U.S.), University of Heidelberg (Germany), University of Cambridge (U.K.), University of Bergen (Norway), University of Sydney (Australia), Universidad Galileo (Guatemala), and University of Copenhagen (Denmark)..LRN provides a complete portal framework with capability for course management, online communities, content management, and learning management. Manhattan Virtual Classroom The Manhattan Virtual Classroom is a password protected, web-based virtual classroom system that includes a variety of discussion groups, live chat, areas for the teacher to post the syllabus and other handouts and notices, a module for organizing online assignments, a grades module, and a unique, web-based system open only to students in the class. Developed at Western New England College, Manhattan is free, and is released under the GNU General Public License. Moodle Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. The design and development of Moodle is guided by a particular philosophy of learning, a way of thinking that you may see referred to in shorthand as a social constructionist pedagogy. The word Moodle is originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It s also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Moodle will run on any computer that can run PHP, and can support many types of database (particularly MySQL). Moodle is an Open-Source e-learning system, currently in use at 987 sites in 74 countries, and has been translated into 34 languages. OLAT Online Learning and Training OLAT is a web-based Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) / Learning Content Management System (LCMS) used in the public sector of Switzerland. The initial development started at the University of Zuerich, Switzerland where it is deployed on the main OLAT server. Official support for OLAT is available at the Multimedia and e-learning Center (Only available for Swiss university members). OLAT is open source and completely free of charge. Sakai The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the Portal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a modular, pre-integrated collection of open source tools. The Sakai Project has just released specifications for higher education open-source software using JavaServer Faces. These specifications, called the Sakai Technology Portability Profile, will ensure software being developed will operate across the systems of participating university partners. 210

5 Seminar REMES: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Free e-learning platform on a PHPBB basis. This platform is supported with 2 languages (German/English) and universities may use them for free. This system is very similar to I-Study. Shibboleth Project Shibboleth, a project of Internet2/MACE, is developing architectures, policy structures, practical technologies, and an open source implementation to support inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls. In addition, Shibboleth will develop a policy framework that will allow inter-operation within the higher education community. It has been tested on various platforms (Windows, Solaris, Mac OS and Linux). The original implementation is entirely in Java, so there is one package for all platforms. Wordcircle CMS Wordcircle is a course management tool focused on the needs of teachers and students looking to collaborate online. The product was designed with certain basic features in mind. In its initial release, the product includes a calendar, discussion board and course materials (files) module as well as a project module for students to store journal entries and documents related to teacher and self-assigned activities. While there are many course management tools like this, not many are easy to use from an educative or administrative standpoint. The user interface is intuitive and clear as is the maintenance of courses and the system itself. Currently, wordcircle is being used by a handful of academic institutions mostly in the United States. The first group to help define and test the system is now using it successfully at Mills College in Oakland, California. Wordcircle, programmed in PHP, is open-source, commercial free and available at no cost. Conclusion To summarize all this we can see, that most of these systems do not consist only of LMS, but extend their abilities and functions with application of Content Management Systems (CMS). Content Management Systems (CMS) are used to store and subsequently find and retrieve large amounts of data. CMS s work by indexing text, audio clips, images, etc., within a database. In addition, CMS s often provide version control and check-in/-out capabilities. Using robust, built-in search capabilities, users can quickly find a piece of content from within a database by typing in keywords, the date the element was created, the name of the author, or other search criteria. So LMS s are with CMS s formed to Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS). LCMS s usually have good search capabilities, allowing developers to quickly find the text or media needed to build training content. Learning content management systems often strive to achieve a separation of content which is often tagged in XML from presentation. This allows many LCMSs to publish to a wide range of formats, platforms, or devices such as print, web, and even wireless information devices (WID) such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or laptop computers, all from the same source material. These abilities are added to LMS for the following three main reasons: firstly, in LMS there is a lack of content creation capabilities, in addition there is a disability of reusing contents, and finally the workflow tools to manage the content development processes are missing. References e-learning Centre: Open source course management systems [online]. e-learning Centre, c URL: < Course Management Systems - EduTools [online]. WCET, c2005. URL: < ATutor Learning Content Management System [online]. Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, c URL: < Brihaspati [online]. ETRG (Education Technology Research Group), IIT Kanpur, c URL: < ynsingh/tool/brihaspati.shtml> Claroline: Open Source e-learning [online]. Catholic University of Louvain, c URL: < The COSE Virtual Learning Environment for Active Collaborative Distributed elearning [online]. Staffordshire University Enterprises Ltd, c2003. URL: < 211

6 REMES: LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM CourseWork: an Open Source Course Management System [online]. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, c2004. URL: < DoceboLMS e-learning open source scorm compliant LMS PHP Mysql [online]. c2005. URL: < Fedora Project [online]. Red Hat Inc., c2005. URL: < Fle3 is a Learning Environment! Fle3 CSCL Software [online]. Learning Environments for Progressive Inquiry research group, c URL: < ILIAS open source [online]. ILIAS-Projektmanagement, c2005. URL: < i-study v1.6 die OpenSource Plattform fur asynchrone kooperative Onlineseminare [online]. Dresing T., Rademacher N., Pehl T., c URL: < [online]..lrn Consortium, Inc., c URL: < Moodle Services moodle.com [online]. Moodle, c2004. URL: < Shibboleth Project Internet2 Middleware [online]. Internet2, c URL: < Wordcircle course management for teachers and students [online]. Matt Reider, c2004. URL: < 212