As a work for the .LRN Consortium we have prepared a newsletter about what happened in the community during July - August '09.

Enjoy!

English: HTML - PDF
Spanish: HTML - PDF

Este es el segundo boletín del GES (Galileo Educational System) en la Universidad Galileo.
Presenta una serie de artículos relacionados al e-Learning, la utilización del sistema LMS .LRN en dicha Universidad, y de las nuevas características que el grupo de desarrollo de Galileo ha incluido en la plataforma .LRN que tienen instalada.

Se puede obtener aquí: http://ges.galileo.edu/fs/download/Bolet%C3%ADn%202?file_id=1027429

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 30th September 2005

The LAMS Foundation today launches the LAMS Community, a global community website for teachers and developers who use the revolutionary open source LAMS software. LAMS creates "digital lesson plans" that can be run online with students, as well as shared among teachers. The LAMS Community allows teachers to share and adapt digital lesson plans, and discuss their experiences of using LAMS.

This announcement signals the birth of "open source teaching", as the LAMS Community encourages the sharing of digital lesson plans under open content licences (using Creative Commons). Now teachers, trainers and professors can find digital lessons plans that are freely available to use and adapt, and they can share their own creations and adaptations to the benefit of all education.

The LAMS Community is based on the MIT developed open source ".LRN" community platform. Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS, recently met at MIT with Alfred Essa, Founder and Co-Chair of the .LRN Consortium, to formalise the use of .LRN for the LAMS Community.

"We are delighted LAMS will use .LRN to host the LAMS Community," said Alfred Essa, "LAMS is a comprehensive open source system for designing and implementing sequences of learning activities. Its visual authoring environment is very impressive".

"The LAMS Community is central to our strategy of empowering teachers to transform education using the revolutionary digital lesson planning approach offered by LAMS. Educators can now freely and openly share 'best practice teaching' in a way never seen before in the history of education," said Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS. "We chose .LRN for its sophisticated community management functions, complementary feature set, and our shared open source philosophy," Dalziel said.

The LAMS Community will benefit from powerful .LRN features for community-based news, discussion forums and sharing of digital lesson plans (or "sequences") and other resources. Initial communities will cover Developers, Technical support and Education including sub-communities for K-12, Higher Education & Training, Research & Development and a new users group called Getting Started. In the future, new sub-communities can be added as interests develop, for example, introductory psychology, maths teachers in the Boston area, occupational health and safety training for retailers, and so on.

The most powerful feature of the LAMS Community will be the ability to share LAMS sequences. Teachers will be able to share their sequences with others, search for sequences, rate sequences and discuss sequences. It will even be possible for sequence contributors to see how many times their sequences have been downloaded. The recommended licence for LAMS sequences will be an open content licence, using the Creative Commons "share alike" approach, encouraging open source teaching.

In addition to using .LRN for the LAMS Community, LAMS today announced plans to provide integration between LAMS and .LRN for course management, to be available in the coming months. This integration will follow a similar approach to that recently announced between LAMS and Moodle.

John Norman, Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology praised the LAMS/.LRN collaboration, saying, "Both .LRN and LAMS have set the pace in the development of collaborative/active learning platforms for higher education. This integration and co-operation between the two projects will create a powerful learning environment for students".

The LAMS Community is now open at www.lamscommunity.org. Both LAMS and .LRN are freely available as open source software under the GNU General Public Licence .LRN is available from dotlrn.org, and is managed by the .LRN Consortium. LAMS is managed by the not-for-profit LAMS Foundation, with support services provided by LAMS International Pty Ltd. Both LAMS organisations are supported by Macquarie University.

Contacts: James Dalziel, LAMS, james@lamsinternational.com & Alfred Essa, .LRN Consortium, www.dotlrn.org

Museum of Science, Boston, one of the world's largest science centers and an emerging hub of educational innovation, today launched its new state-of-the-art Learning Management System based on .LRN.

During the first phase, the Museum has rolled out .LRN's e-commerce module to process all course registrations. LRN's e-commerce module is also being used to process and manage telephone, fax, and mail-in registrations, serving as the administrative hub for centrally managing all registration information.

As a regional and national leader among science museums, the Museum of Science serves as a pioneer in building technological literacy. As it continues to expand its innovative educational course offerings, the Museum plans to deliver a range of on-line course content with full collaboration capabilities using .LRN.

Rob Ross, the project lead for the implementation, "The Museum's mission is to enhance knowledge of technology in our community and nationwide. We are pleased to take this step with .LRN to build our online capabilities—offering web site browsers the convenience of using this technology to register online for a variety of science- and technology-related courses at the Museum."

For more information about the .LRN implementation at Boston's Museum of Science, please contact Caroline Meeks at Solution Grove.

Madrid, June 2005, The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), one of Spain's premier universities has joined the .LRN Consortium and is moving their 200,000 students to the .LRN system for course management and online communities.

UNED is Spain's "Open University" and serves approximately 200,000 students. Its mission is to provide distance education throughout Spain and has a strong international presence with study centres in Bata, Bern, Bonn, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lisbon, London, Malabo, Mexico D.F., Miami, Paris, Rosario, Sao Paulo and Tangeirs. UNED also has a strong commitment to creating an "Ibero-American university space" in Spanish and Portugese speaking countries throughout the world.

Jesus G. Boticario, who serves in the Vice-Principal Office for Innovation and Technological Development and is an Assoc. Professor in Department of Artificial Intelligence at UNED, has also agreed to serve on the .LRN Board for a two-year term.

After the compliance tests for SCORM 1.2, .LRN has been featured in the ADL site.

Thank you to Ernie for writing LORS, to all the people that has helped make it a great product and to Michele Slocovich for performing the tests.

"Congratulations. Your organization has become a SCORM Adopter and has been posted to the SCORM Adopters section of ADLNet.org (www.adlnet.org). To fully support the SCORM Adopters Initiative, you are encouraged to include a link from your product page to ADLNet.org. Now that you have become a SCORM Adopter the ADL Initiative also recognizes you as an ADL Partner.

eSchool News reports on .LRN and launch of the .LRN Consortium.

http://eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=5362

Consortium to Accelerate Adoption of Collaborative Education Software at Institutions Around the Globe
Scalable open source .LRN application and development tools support integrated teaching, research and collaboration

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 12, 2004 -- Members of a multi-university project on open source software for collaborative education today announced formation of the .LRN ("Dot-Learn") Consortium to accelerate and expand development of an open source application suite currently used by a quarter million students and educators at institutions of higher education and research around the globe.

The .LRN Project encompasses an ongoing 10-year development effort and represents the world's largest open source project for scalable educational software. Built on the OpenACS project, .LRN applications originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and enhancements from the past several years have been deployed by the MIT Sloan School of Management as SloanSpace -- its primary means of providing class management and community support. At present, SloanSpace hosts more than 10,000 student and faculty users, amounting to 1,250+ unique logins per day.

Along with the MIT Sloan School, charter members of the .LRN Consortium include Heidelberg University, The European Union-funded E-Lane Project and the University of Sydney.

Nearly 40 application modules of the .LRN system today are deployed at two dozen universities and research organizations on five continents. The comprehensive suite of scalable components, along with a powerful development framework, has been continually extended to support a broad set of solutions for collaboration in a variety of settings. Applications include:

• Class management, such as content aggregation and syndication among universities.
• Multi-party learning simulations involving complex roles and workflows.
• Community support for structured (polls, surveys) and unstructured (bulletin boards) interaction.
• Assessment & testing integrated with authoring and reporting tools.
• Constituent communications, including weblogs and class notes.

"The applications and development tools that make up .LRN have been in continual development for a decade, resulting in a robust collaborative education platform," said Al Essa, co-chair of the .LRN Board. "Deployments in every corner of the globe have fostered growing interest from higher education, research organizations, even K-12 school districts. It became clear to a number of us that establishing a consortium would help make the suite more available to institutions -- all of which are eager to capitalize on .LRN's rapid implementation, flexibility and low cost of ownership."

The Consortium's charter members all utilize .LRN in collaborative education efforts. Heidelberg University manages hundreds of courses with internationalization features; the E-LANE project is developing new methodologies to integrate technology into learning; and the University of Sydney is leveraging various technology standards to improve cross-institution collaboration.

"MIT recognizes that leadership in education needs to be matched by leadership in educational technology," said Professor Steven D. Eppinger, Deputy Dean and Chair of the Educational Technology Task Force at the MIT Sloan School. "We have benefited tremendously by utilizing .LRN as a central element of our educational technology infrastructure in the MIT Sloan School. It integrates course management with collaboration support for online communities. We have been pleased with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that .LRN has afforded us so far, and we look forward to seeing its further innovations."

A sampling of other institutions now running innovative .LRN implementations includes the University of Bergen, Norway's major urban university. Bergen has developed a portal integrating the academic experience across two geographically dispersed campuses, managing 1,500 courses with 13,000 users. The Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration employs .LRN to support its blended learning model for undergraduate courses, and leverages .LRN's open architecture to develop highly customized extensions for its students.

Organizations interested in learning more about .LRN or in joining the consortium may visit http://dotlrn.org for details. A technical background on the .LRN framework and descriptions of particular modules may be obtained at http://dotlrn.org/features/.

About The .LRN Consortium™The .LRN Consortium (http://www.dotlrn.org) is a tax-exempt, not-for-profit corporation formed in 2004 to promote adoption and further development of .LRN software, a scalable open-source application suite and development framework that fosters innovation around collaborative educational technology. Based in Cambridge, Mass., the Consortium certifies components as .LRN-compliant, coordinates software development plans, and offers support and services to users in over 18 countries around the world. Charter members of the .LRN Consortium are MIT's Sloan School of Management (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/), Heidelberg University (http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/), The European Union-funded E-Lane Project (http://e-lane.org/) and the University of Sydney (http://www.usyd.edu.au/).

.LRN is a trademark of The .LRN Consortium.

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