Dokkeos

A few weeks ago, I explained how to change the Dokeos footer to make it "float". Today, in the context of an indirect contract with the Ministry of Education in Peru, I have to change the style a little bit more. The idea is to [1] have a left bar showing large tools icons in the course homepage, and [2] have an alternative portal homepage for users, showing an introductory screen of the main general tools. This must all work on a 800x600 screen (which is a real challenge).

[1] Left toolbar showing course tools

This is not as tricky as it sounds (although it's very close to it).

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.

I just finished debugging one client's portal. For some reason, he couldn't see his SCORM content although he could see them in other LMS (Moodle, Claroline, ...). After spending 2 minutes checking the files and directories names, I realised he had stuff like this:

Act_Positive%20and%20negative[1]/.

as root SCORM path.

I'm currently reviewing quickly the slow queries occuring in MySQL when querying the database of a Dokeos 1.8.5 campus with 200.000 users. Of course, the number of users influences largely the execution time of a query, MySQL being known (to me at least, from experience with Dokeos and Avanquest) to be behaving particularly badly from 1M records in a single table upwards. Of course also, as you might have guessed already, most of the queries that lag the most are those related directly to users, and particularly relations between the users table and a log table or a registration table. Here

I just integrated the first web service implementation for Dokeos.

Wow... this is great news for us. Mike Melanson, the developer of the Linux version of the Flash plugin, just announced on his blog that Flash plugin 10 beta 2 will start supporting V4L2! For Dokeos, this means that we will now be able to use the video recording of our little webcams directly from Linux. This is probably the great news of the day...

2008-10-11 update

I'm just finishing an hour of testing here.

Tonight I'm upgrading campus.dokeos.com to dokeos 1.8.5. One of the things that is difficult to put in a human mind is the number of users and courses on this portal and the implication it has on upgrade time. Over the last 5 days, 600 new users have registered on this portal, which made it pass the 200K users for the very first time. The portal still works nicely. It's now on a single cuad-core server, but it used to work on a Pentium 4 for 125K users. That's the beauty of Dokeos. However, upgrades to newer versions are always a difficult task.

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...

We've had reports about Dokeos creating problems when used with MySQL in strict mode. There's a large topic development on the forum about that. The idea is that MySQL can be set to be more strict about the SQL syntax used in queries.

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.