About .LRN

Carl Robert Blesius, Board Chairman Harvard/MIT Health Sciences & Technology

Carl Blesius is an Intructor with an appointment at Harvard Medical School who works in the Laboratory of Computer Science at Mass General Hospital in Boston. His research interests lie in medical informatics and developing technology tools to support research collaboration. Carl led the .LRN implementation effort ar Heidelberg Medical School and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He is now running an installation at Harvard's main teaching hospital (MGH) and the Partners Healthcare system. Carl received his M.D. from Heidelberg Medical School.

 

Rocael Hernández Galileo University, Guatemala

Rocael is the e-campus and e-learning director in the Research and Development Department at Galileo University, in Guatemala, the top technological University in the country. In their .LRN installation at Galileo they have about 100,000 registered users with about 30,000 active per semester. About 2,500 courses are given per semester in Galileo, and all the web services from the public page, to University payments to online classes are built atop .LRN.

His research is mainly in web applications, user interaction, online communities, e-learning both areas: technical and methodological. He has been involved with .LRN its technology since 2000. Also seved as the technical leader of the E-LANE project, a European-funded initiative to set up e-Learning demonstration initiatives in Latin America..

Gustaf Neumann Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration

Gustaf is Chair for Information Systems/New Media at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. A native of Vienna, Austria, he graduated from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU), Austria, in 1983 and holds a Ph.D. from the same university. He joined the faculty of WU in 1983 as Assistant Professor at the MIS department and served as head of the research group for Logic Programming and Intelligent Information Systems. Before joining the faculty at Vienna University, Gustaf Neumann was Prof. of Information Systems and Software Techniques at the University of Essen, Germany. Earlier he was visiting scientist at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, from 1985-1986 and 1993-1995. In 1987, he was awarded the Heinz-Zemanek award of the Austrian Association of Computer Science (OCG) for best dissertation (Metainterpreter Directed Compilation of Logic Programs into Prolog). Professor Neumann has published books and papers in the areas of program transformation, data modeling, information systems technology and security management. He is the author of several widely used programs that are freely available, such as the TeX-dvi converter dvi2xx and the graphical front-end package Wafe.

Jesus G. Boticario Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Jesus G. Boticario is an associate professor of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the School of Computer Science (CSS) at UNED. He has held several positions at UNED in the area of e-learning and ICT’s (General Director of the Centre of Innovation and Technological Development, Innovation and Technological Development Vice-principal, Director of Innovation). He has published more than 100 research articles in the areas of adaptive interfaces, user modelling and e-learning. He has participated in 14 R&D funded projects (European Commission, National Science Foundation –USA, Ministry of Education in Spain, Madrid, Galician and Castilla-La Mancha Communities). He has been an invited speaker at national and international conferences, forums and institutions. He is currently the head of a certified R&D group at UNED (Ref: G74E25), aDeNu (http://adenu.ia.uned.es/), and the scientific coordinator in two European and 3 National funded projects in the area of eInclusion.

Caroline Meeks Solution Grove

Caroline Meeks was a co-founder of .LRN and was the project manager and visionary for the first installation at MIT Sloan.  Caroline founded Solution Grove to expand the number of organizations that can benefit from OpenACS and .LRN.   Solution Grove's .LRN clients include the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Concord Consortium, Mass General Hospital/Partners Healthcare and many others.  Caroline has a degrees from MIT and the University of Massachusetts and is currently a special student at Harvard Graduate School for Education studying Learning Technology.

Abelardo Pardo Carlos III University of Madrid

Abelardo Pardo is an Associate Professor of Telematics Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests are in the area of computer-supported learning, adaptive hypermedia and multimedia content creation. He is member of the .LRN community where he participated in the implementation of the Learning Design support within the platform. He has also participated in several international research projects and is the principal investigator of the Flexo project on adaptive elearning platforms.

Rafael Pastor Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Rafael Pastor is a Senior Lecturer in the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia; National Distance Learning University) in Spain and also the Innovation Manager of the Centre for Technological Innovation and Development (CInDeTec), the strategic unit responsible for the development and innovation in learning technology for the university, including the eLearning platform aLF/dotLRN. He holds a Physics Degree (Complutense University in Madrid) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (from UNED). Also, between 1998 and 2000, he has worked for a private university (European University of Madrid) in its Computer Science Department, as assistant professor.

He has been in charge of education technology innovation and development for over five years and during that time, building on work undertaken before, has lead the consolidation of aLF/.LRN as the university’s eLearning platform and the design and development of new teaching tools important for .LRN to increase the flexibility of how users can work with the platform. The mayor improvements are: a block-based planning type like the one that Moodle has, adapted to the UNED methodology; major updates to the forums tool to make them more like WebCT [with better thread structuring and ways to present the messages and attach documents]; a new content management tool [in order to achieve better user experience in the design of learning materials, to provide tracking tools of content views, terms glossary ], a search/retrieval interface to integrate FEDORA as a system of federated repositories, the integration of the UNED’s audio-video conferencing system [via a reservation system]; improvements in evaluation package [better students evaluations’ interfaces, including an extended student card and tab system for students responses management]; improvements in the assessments package and its integration with evaluation.