Dokkeos

Hehe... Should I announce it or should I keep it quiet a little bit more? :-) The beta is now available for download from the Dokeos repository: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.6-beta.zip There has been an enormous amount of work on this version. If you find any bug, please report it in http://projects.dokeos.com, after checking that it hasn't been reported already. We'll start making proper announcements soon :-)

As the beta draws closer (it should have been released last week but we had to add some last minute stuff to avoid waiting 6 months before being able to integrate them), we just happened to organise the January Drupal Perú reunion here in Lima, and...

Only less than 3 months since the new free campus is up, and we already have 36000 users and 5000 courses...

Today I had to explain to a customer how to register time and completeness in a SCORM learning path, considering he's got Flash content and he doesn't know anything about SCORM. This is what I answered (with little changes) The idea is that Dokeos deals with SCORM contents by providing a JavaScript API (a library that can be called from the Flash) to enable SCORM features. To enable this, there are various steps that need to be taken... 1. Your content should be a SCORM package. 2. Each step of your content should send a LMSInitialize() call to the Dokeos SCORM API when opened. 3.

I added a nice changelog (or rather "new features" log) on the Dokeos 1.8.6 page (see link above), and also took the opportunity to refresh the schedule :-)

I sure am discovering a lot of interesting stuff on the net this week. I'm just done reading and watching a video on the eLML website. First reaction: interesting project. Apparently, some of the developers of fellow e-learning management system OLAT are involved in the development of eLML as well. eLML is just an XML schema for writing learning content.

Reading PHP Architect's November 2008 issue (and in particular the Google Gadgets article by Timothy Boronczyk), I remembered reading a name yesterday (on the Elgg.org features list) that I have seen very often and which I never  got to the bottom of: OAuth. Well, today I decided that this ignorance was enough and that it was time to get there and see what it is... and it just happens to be exactly what we need in Dokeos to secure our web services!

The next development release is planned for the 7th or 8th of January 2009. We are first making sure all changes are in the database, then we will make sure everything works, then we'll release this version. Once it is released, there will be a 1 week debug period. Once this week is over, we will release the first Release Candidate and, if nobody complains, the Stable Release one week later.

Yesterday I finished a 20 hours job of moving the SCORM API in Dokeos 1.8.6 from XAJAX to jQuery.

[caption id="attachment_302" align="alignright" width="100" caption="Dokeos in Colombia"][/caption] I'm leaving in just a few minutes from now for the airport, to go to Colombia for 2 important conferences. One about freedom of knowledge, another about Ubuntu in Colombia.