e-learning

As I was in Cusco the other week to hold a few speeches at a 3 days conference, I took the opportunity to go to Machu Picchu. This time, I managed to walk to the Intipunku (la Puerta del Sol, The Sun Gate) and take a picture from there, wearing my wonderful - but old now - Dokeos t-shirt from the 2005 User's Day.

I'll be having two speeches at a free software event in Cusco these 24, 25 and 26th of September 2008. If you would like to meet us there, please get in touch beforehand by e-mail or a comment over here. See the official announcement for more details

I forgot to mention that in the past, but the free campus (http://campus.dokeos.com) now integrates OpenID recognition. To use it (if you already have an account on the free campus and an OpenID), just log into the campus, go to your My Profile page and add your OpenID in the apropriate field. [caption id="attachment_220" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Campus' profile page"]

Following my article on SCORM 2.0 White Paper call, and the kind personal invitation to contribute from Mike Rustici, I decided to go ahead and submit my list of suggestions to the SCORM 2.0 thinking process team just before the deadline (I've been quite busy on other stuff, including urgent personal matters). This is the first time ever that Dokeos contributes somehow (even though it's a very little piece of the enormous puzzle) to the design of an e-learning standard.

There's a nice comparative study (if I get it right, it's based on analysis a few months back) between e-learning solutions here. The nice thing is it offers a cute chart of 4 axis of analysis, by an external company, so this is more likely to be a neutral result. No mention of Blackboard though...

I thought I'll write a short update on what we are doing at Dokeos at the moment, so you don't think we're just sleeping through the summer holidays... Eric and Julian, of the French team, are currently working on a project for a specific hospital management school in France, and on a large and long-time review project before the migration of portals to version 1.8.5 for an important Belgian client.

I have added a Dokeos 1.8.6 page with details of the roadmap for 1.8.6, and hidden the Dokeos 1.8.5 page, considering we are now fully into the development of fixes and new features for 1.8.6.

I'm often faced (locally) to the question about our videoconference tool... It is true that a lot of videoconference tools have appeared recently, even in Open-Source, so we don't really have a unique marketing argument to defend it. The initial idea behind the videoconference was that, at a time where DimDim and other videoconference tool were still closed-source or didn't even exist (in mid-2006, that is), we wanted to offer a videoconference tool as a complementary tool for Dokeos, so we asked Sebastian Wagner, a German developer, to do this for us.

Although not very reliable per se, the following article, written in 2006, has an interesting set of comments (part by me) about statistics about Moodle, Blackboard/WebCT and Sakai, and Dokeos of course. http://zacker.org/higher-ed-lms-market-penetration-moodle-vs-blackboard-vs-sakai

I was playing around a little bit with a code metrics tool on the Ohloh website and, although I'm sure there's some kind of arguable element there as some included libraries add a lot of "noise" in code contributions, I was happily surprised to see that Dokeos isn't doing bad at all and is starting to get back at Moodle, in terms of code, contributors and global activity.