Harvard Open Source Courseware

mpawlo writes "Gnuheter reports that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society releases the H20 courseware software as open source. Two years and 1 million USD are invested in the software so far... The software has been tested at Harvard Law School, but should be suitable for other disciplines than law."

Comments

A best-of-breed up-and-coming framework

[Evolutionary Soldier]

Disclaimer: I am not connected in any way with MIT (I'm from Univ. of Texas at Austin). MIT (along with others) has an excellent project called dotlrn:

MIT Intellectual Commons (collection of related e-learning initiatives including dotlrn): http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html

What is .LRN? (from www.dotlrn.org ):

-A fully open source eLearning platform.

-A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.

-A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.

-A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.

-A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.

The dotlrn project page has documentation, news, forums... It is hosted on the www.openacs.org site, which is the parent web framework upon which dotlrn is based. Besides the above, the framework has a rich architecture for managing permissions, users, groups, content management, course management, forums, email, and more.

Re:Not full courseware

[adamfranco]

I am currently working at Middlebury College developing a GPL course management system called Segue.

segue.middlebury.edu - our current version, in use by over 100 courses (double the total number of course websites from last year).

The Segue Project Page

Segue approches Course Management from the "Course Website" paradigm as oposed to "course folders" paradigm of BlackBoard and WebCT. We feel that websites as they are, are a superior way of displaying information than the idea of posting documents for download. Our goals were to make a system that is platform independent and will allow even the most technically timmid professors to quickly and easily get their course information and discussions online. On both fronts we've had much success; professors find the system easy to use (even the foreign language departments) and all functionality is availible from any platform with the exception of WYSIWYG text formatting. We are looking for a browser-independent XML WYSIWYG editor to replace our ActiveX one for PCIE. Any recomendations on this front would be welcome.

Segue is written in PHP and currently runs on a mySQL database. As of May however, we will be using ADODB to support virtually all databases. In April our development team will be heading to MIT to work out OKI interoperability.

Our code is all GPL so check it out!