Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: interesting chat about moodle / .LRN

Collapse
Posted by Alfred Essa on
I have dropped out from the .LRN project for both personal and professional reasons. I plan to get more involved again soon as my new institution begins to use .LRN on a small scale.

A couple of frustrations (only a sample) that I have had with OpenACS and .LRN.

a) Installation. Moodle is easy to install compared to OpenACS/.LRN. This is a typical conversation I have overheard at conferences among educators: "Yeah. Moodle is great. Go to the web site. You can download it and install it so easily." A moron like me can install Moodle in 5 minutes (yes, that's what it takes). By contrast, you have to be a rocket scientist and prepare magical incantations to install OpenACS/.LRN. We talk about building a community among teachers. As a first step, make it easy for an educator to download and install OpenACS/.LRN. The technical community has never regarded this as a priority and I am not sanguine that this will change in the near future. We take manly pride in keeping things as obscure as possible.

b) $$$ Support. This is an area where I admit that the .LRN leadership, principally me, failed miserably. We have large sites using .LRN but are unwilling to contribute even a small amount (e.g. $1,000) of funding towards the project. If they were using Blackboard their licensing alone would be in the six figures ($100,000). I was never able to figure out how to turn that around. We have always had to rely on the voluntarism of the OpenACS community and one or two institutions bankrolling most of the development. That was and is still not sustainable.

Collapse
Posted by Pablo Moreno-Ger on
Facilitating installation is something that I'm trying to figure out working with Carl Blesius.

The amount of required backend software will not make it easier to install the software by traditional methods. An interesting outcome of the work on the e-lane project (http://www.e-lane.org/) was a Live CD that already included all the software.

A different approach was followed by John Sequeira with the creation of an openACS virtual machine (http://www.jsequeira.com/projects/oasisvm/) that would launch an OS with all the system tools.

We are trying to build on top of what John created a series of user-oriented virtual installations of openACS/.LRN, that should facilitate the installation part. We already have a virtual image that we are using internally, focused on learning how to use the platform. We are planning on improving that and in developing production-oriented images.

We'll keep you posted on this...

Collapse
Posted by Jun Yamog on
Hi Al,

I think (b) is important. Sometimes with (b) you can solve (a). Its the community aspect that is hard to do, a big community may also lead into better (b) support funding.

There are also other stuff that moodle will have and is not trivial for .lrn/openacs to do. Such as the moodle community hub.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50247
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub_technotes

This feature when done will greatly leverage the number of moodle sites. As of now .lrn is still technically better than moodle, which means most features in moodle can be done in .lrn. In about a year or 2, moodle will be able to close the technical gap (mainly CR and permissions) and create new feature gaps (community hub, better enrollment integration) that .lrn will need to catchup.

.lrn needs to figure out how to bring its community closer to one another. I am pretty sure there are lots of .lrn users since there are big installation of .lrn. Having users talking to one another may give some common direction/feature that hopefully may turnout some funding.

Community hubs is a great idea, and goes beyond the technology itself. Anyway, we (.LRN) should focus on increase the community (size and kind). Well, actually, openacs as well needs to increase the community.