I have led the implementation of WebCT for a major university and we have had MAJOR problems with WebCT (admin, usage, training, support, etc.). There have been a lot of changes in this market over the last year and to add to the problems WebCT has made some serious changes to their business model as they moved away from their university roots and into the corporate world (among other things this has resulted in a 500% change in pricing for campus licensing and a total rewrite of the Perl based version that can now be viewed as abandonware). Obviously if our students and teachers actually used WebCT we would have had to swallow these changes and continue on the bumpy road dictated by WebCT... but luckily that has not been the case.
For this reason we have been evaluating lots of different systems over the last 5 months and in our search we came across an application that is built on top of an industrial strength web application framework that was born in the CS department of MIT and has a very active open source community supporting it (http://openacs.org). All data is stored in a database (Oracle or Postgresql - i.e. it can be spit out in any standard compliant format needed in the future) and it is served using a heavy duty open source web/application server (AOLServer). The actual application that is built on this framework (http://dotlrn.mit.edu) is focused on community building and sounds like something that would probably interest you. We have decided as an institution to go with dotLRN (with more than 30,000 users), but we are still in the planning phases right now (we should be going live in the first or second quarter of 2003). Word of warning... although dotLRN has been in active use at various institutions around the world for more than two years (in an earlier version called AECS), the "boxed" second version that MIT is funding (dotLRN) is still in a testing phase (although it is being used in production at more than one adventurous school at the moment). Do not be upset though... the present version can be pulled from the public CVS and it works very well... and the "boxed" version should be coming in September. DotLRN was built with scalability, performance, community, and modularity in mind (i.e. modules that expand its present capabilities are being built as a write this: xml-based LMS, quiz module, presentation module, bookmarks module, glossary module... to name a few) and it is going to make some waves.
Slashdot Mirror
I have led the implementation of WebCT for a major university and we have had MAJOR problems with WebCT (admin, usage, training, support, etc.). There have been a lot of changes in this market over the last year and to add to the problems WebCT has made some serious changes to their business model as they moved away from their university roots and into the corporate world (among other things this has resulted in a 500% change in pricing for campus licensing and a total rewrite of the Perl based version that can now be viewed as abandonware). Obviously if our students and teachers actually used WebCT we would have had to swallow these changes and continue on the bumpy road dictated by WebCT... but luckily that has not been the case.
For this reason we have been evaluating lots of different systems over the last 5 months and in our search we came across an application that is built on top of an industrial strength web application framework that was born in the CS department of MIT and has a very active open source community supporting it (http://openacs.org). All data is stored in a database (Oracle or Postgresql - i.e. it can be spit out in any standard compliant format needed in the future) and it is served using a heavy duty open source web/application server (AOLServer). The actual application that is built on this framework (http://dotlrn.mit.edu) is focused on community building and sounds like something that would probably interest you. We have decided as an institution to go with dotLRN (with more than 30,000 users), but we are still in the planning phases right now (we should be going live in the first or second quarter of 2003). Word of warning... although dotLRN has been in active use at various institutions around the world for more than two years (in an earlier version called AECS), the "boxed" second version that MIT is funding (dotLRN) is still in a testing phase (although it is being used in production at more than one adventurous school at the moment). Do not be upset though... the present version can be pulled from the public CVS and it works very well... and the "boxed" version should be coming in September. DotLRN was built with scalability, performance, community, and modularity in mind (i.e. modules that expand its present capabilities are being built as a write this: xml-based LMS, quiz module, presentation module, bookmarks module, glossary module... to name a few) and it is going to make some waves.