(26.05.2010) As one of the 13 finalists in the category "New and Research & Development" eLML got invited to the IMS Learning Impact 2010,
which was held from 17th to 20th March in Long Beach, California, USA.
We congratulate the eLML team on the silver medal at the IMS Learning Impact Awards 2010!
(12.05.2010) After several months of competition the Virtual Campus Rheinland Pfalz (VCRP) has now decided to add OLAT to its e-learning
portfolio. The
VCRP is a joint research facility of a total of 12 universities and colleges in the federal state Rhineland-Palatinate. It's aim
is to initiate and coordinate e-learning activities. Welcome to the OLAT community!
(04.05.2010) The 2nd OLAT Core Community Meeting was held from 28th to the 30th April at the University of Zurich. Recent and upcoming
developments were presentated. Many issues and the road map were discussed. Besides that the new members were welcomed, so
the meeting was also a get-together. Want to know more about the sessions? Have a look at the
CoCo Meeting 2010 Wiki!
(28.04.2010) There is so much to say about OLAT! Enjoy our new movies where Users and Developers tell you what is important
about OLAT!!
(21.04.2010) Yet another 6.x release and we would like to use this as an occasion to publish our
Newsletter no. 2!
(18.03.2010) We proudly announce the release of the new OLAT 6.3.0 version. Some major improvements have been made and a bulk of new features
have been added: new learning resources (Podcast, Blog, Topic assignment, Calendar), extended full text search (search results
are shown in an overlay), major rebuild of the notifications, new log-files statistic tool and many more. For a full list
of bug fixes and improvements check the
release notes and our
Bug tracking System. Continue to the
download section...
(10.02.2010) E-Learning Tools under the Patronage of universities make their point(s). OLAT took the third place at the customer satisfaction
study „eLearningCHECK 2010“, which obtains German-speaking eLearning Customers. De facto this means No. 1 of the Open Source
LMS! Have yourself a look at the
press release. (Please note, that checkpoint-elearning.de is written in german)
(25.01.2010) OLAT was presented by Sandra Arnold at this year’s IC4E Conference, which was all about E-Learning, E-Business, E-Management
and E-Education. The main two topics of the presentation were an introduction to the key features of OLAT and how we set up
and organized our open source community. The audience was mainly involved in research at various Asian universities and those,
who are currently evaluating e-learning platforms, were interested in getting to know our open-source LMS. They were impressed
to see the numbers of translations and available course elements. And Sandra didn't miss the chance to mention our brand new
features. We'll keep you posted!
(13.01.2010) For the third time the
University of Hamburg published its "Hamburger eLMagazin". The focus of this volume is on "OLAT in practice". On nearly 30 of the overall 45 pages
different authors from various institutions outline how they use OLAT with their specific issues. Enjoy the
online PDF. (Please note, that the "Hamburger eLMagazin" is written in german)
(19.11.2009) OLAT was well represented at last weeks DevLearn conference and Expo. At the Expo the University of Zurich's booth, where
Joël Fisler presented both OLAT and eLML, was well visited by people from higher education and from company representatives.
Hardly anyone in the US had ever heard of OLAT
Joël Fislers presentation @ DevLearn 2009and so most people where even more surprised when they saw the live demo and the clean and easy to use interface. We did receive
a lot of comments saying that at first impression OLAT seemed easier to use and more powerful than many commercial and open
source learning management systems used within the US market. Joël Fisler attended also the demofest and the conference where
he was able to hold a presentation about the tools followed by a lively discussion about open source tools in education. First
cooperation plans with commercial companies and with a US university have been established and we will announce them on our
website as soon as the deals are fixed. After visiting three conferences and expos in the US and Canada during the last month
we feel optimistic that finally OLAT will start to become recognized and used in North America.
(11.11.2009) Recently we released the new version 6.2.2 - this is another maintenance release. For a full list of bugfixes and improvements
check our
Bug tracking System. Continue to the
download section...
(04.11.2009) OLAT was present at
AACE's E-Learn 2009 conference in Vancouver in late October. Joël Fislers "best practice" presentation entitled "Creating, handling and implementing e-learning
courses and content using the open source tools OLAT and eLML at the University of Zurich" covered both the content creation
tool eLML and the open source LMS OLAT plus a short live demonstration. The conference offered up to 12 parallel session,
so we are happy to have counted maybe 20 attendees at our session. A second OLAT demonstration was held two days later at
a swap of ideas and open source tools between educators and IT specialists. Besides these presentation lots of informal talks
and exchanging of ideas made the E-Learn 2009 in Vancouver a real success for the OLAT project.
(15.10.2009) The OLAT team has released OLAT 6.2.1 today. As usual for a maintenance release it contains some bug fixes and also some
improvements: QTI editor provides now a table functionality, formatting issues with TinyMC and tests, forum preview, css default
theme references files that do not exist, daily updated search index.
Continue to the download section...
(13.10.2009) Considering the fact that OLAT has been translated to both traditional and simplified Chinese, it was about high time to
get in touch with interested OLAT users and translators from the area. Participating in the TELearn (Technology Enhanced Learning)
conference in Taipei seemed just about the right occasion to mingle with university members interested in LMS and open source
software in general. We had many opportunities to talk about the features and functionalities of our LMS during the poster
session and to get into touch with people visiting our small booth. We'd like to welcome new OLAT users and invite you to
share your impressions as a OLAT newbie with our community. At the same time, subscribe to our
newsletter and keep yourself posted!
(06.10.2009) OLAT grows continuously and so does the number of users and developers. This results in interesting news and information
we want to share with you. So, here it is:
the first OLAT newsletter.
(29.09.2009) As planned, the new version 6.2.0 is released today. Some major enhancements are done and a bulk of new features have been
added: calendar import/export, new IMS-Content-Packages Editor, a TinyMC Editor Upgrade (e.g. formula editor), extended export
function for grouplists and many more.
(24.09.2009) On 23th September the 2nd CH Open Source Award was held during the
"OpenExpo 2009" in Winterthur (Swiss).
"eLML" won in the category 'Education Award'! With this price young talents are promoted, who are campaigning in a FOSS project.
Check the
CH Open Source Award Website for further information.
(23.09.2009) This year's
"21st Century Learning Conference" took place in Hong Kong and was about "Extending Tomorrow's Leader with Digital Learning". The conference was mainly attended
by teachers and IT administrators of international schools from Asia and Oceania. OLAT seized the chance to be present in
this area for the very first time. Even if the scope of the conference was rather broad, there were surprisingly many participants
interested in OLAT, or in open source software in general. There was a vivid discussion about "E-learning and open source
tools" during the Unconference session on Friday and a 45min presentation about "What is a LMS? What is OLAT?" held by Sandra
Arnold-Roth. The audience was particularly impressed about the multilingual user interface - big thanks to our active translator
community!
(21.09.2009) The first OLAT User Day was held on September 11th at the University of Zurich. So far we can say: it was a success! The
OLAT User Day gave the participants the opportunity to meet up others from the OLAT community. Just to come together, share
ideas and to discuss matters of common interests. Main issues were the work with and on OLAT: Developers, authors and users
were swapping ideas on workflows, problems, news and particularities the whole day through. The participant’s feedback was
throughout positive.
(13.07.2009) As already announced in spring, the OLAT User Day will be held on September 11th, 2009, and you are kindly invited to participate.
The OLAT User Day is an event where the OLAT community gathers together to exchange ideas. During the day, there will be kind
of an „unconference“; in several sessions topics of common interests will be discussed. In the evening, we will celebrate
the 10th anniversary of OLAT. For details, registration (until August 30th!), submitting a session proposal etc.
check the OLAT User Day Wiki.
(25.05.2009) As most of you know, we did have a core community meeting two weeks ago at the University of Zurich in which also BPS, Frentix
and the University of Hamburg (UHH) participated. The result of this very successful meeting was a
detailed roadmap, a more concise
incubation and publication process for new features and a
core community meeting page with more information about the held presentations, photos, slides etc. Since there are more and more community events (OLAT
Conference, OLAT User Day, Google Summer of Code etc.) we decided to introduce a new
"Community" tab within the OLAT website. The "Community" section contains both existing and new pages.
(20.05.2009) Our first scalable 6.1 release needed some improvements and thus our first maintenance release 6.1.1 contains about 40 fixed
Jira issues. The bug fixes include:
(18.05.2009)
At last week's IMS Learning Impact conference in Barcelona the Global Learning Consortium announced the
results of the Impact Award competition. OLAT was awarded with a "Leadership Award" for "Best Open Source Learning Platform". The OLAT team is honored to have received
such a unique award. A quote from the press release of IMS:
"The LIA awards are unique in that they recognize the use of technology in context. Nominations include not only information
about the technology but how it is used by an education provider. In addition, the entries are evaluated according to eight
criteria of impact, including improving access to learning, improving affordability of learning, and improving the quality
of learning." (IMS 2009)Starting in 2009 OLAT plans to become an IMS member and implement more IMS standards.
(30.04.2009) Next week the OLAT core developers from the University of Zurich, Frentix GmbH, Bildungsportal Sachsen (BPS) and the University
of Hamburg will meet for three days in Zurich to discuss issues about OLAT development, eAssessment, scalability, testing
infrastructure and the OLAT roadmap. Besides that we will also integrate new features from our German partners into the main
OLAT core during our "hackfest". We'll post the results of the three-day workshop on the OLAT website. If you're interested
about the detailed schedule,
download our PDF-information file or contact Patrick Brunner, the head of our development team. Both the document and the workshop are held in German but the
results will be published in English.
(15.03.2009) With some days of delay we are proud to announce our latest OLAT release (OLAT 6.1). Certainly the most important new feature
is: clustering! For about two years we have been working on a scalable solution for our LMS and are happy to release with
6.1 the first scalable version of OLAT. Consisting of three independent nodes the main OLAT server at the University of Zurich
has been running stable for over a month now.
(11.03.2009) On the 11th September 2009 we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of OLAT, and would like to invite you, as a user and member
of our community, to join us. You will have the opportunity to meet up with like-minded people, to discuss matters of common
interests, swap ideas, and – of course – to celebrate with us. So don‘t miss the OLAT User Day 2009, and make the entry in
your diary today! More details will follow. Hope to see you in Zurich! Feel free to
download the postcard if you didn't get one by "Snail Mail".
(17.02.2009) Yesterday the University of Hamburg announced that they will switch from Blackboard to OLAT. Their blackboard license ends
in April 2010 but they will already offer an OLAT server for the next summer semester 2009. Thanks to the scalability release
6.1 OLAT fits Hamburg's needs for a high number of concurrent users. For more information
read the press release [50kB - Filetype: PDF in German] or visit the
University of Hamburg eLearning website. Welcome on board!!!
(13.02.2009) We have since two weeks a beta version of OLAT 6.1 - the first fully scalable OLAT version - running successfully on three
nodes at the University of Zurich. A few more bug fixes and then we are ready to release it to the public. The release is
planned for Tuesday, March 10th 2009. We will be in the OLAT and the facebook chat the whole morning of the release, so join
in Facebook if you have questions, comments, feedback etc.
(12.02.2009) At this year's Learntec OLAT had again its own booth conveniently situated next to the fair hall entry. And as we don't change
winning teams the University of Zurich was again supported by Frentix GmbH (Christian Franck) and by the Bildungsportal Sachsen
(Frank Richter). This time we put some extra effort in furnishing our booth: new posters were designed and lots of OLAT cubes
made of cardboard folded. Check out the pictures to see them hanging from the booth ceiling.
Many interested fair attendees paid a visit to our booth for a shorter or longer OLAT presentation. We got lots of positive
feedback concerning the smooth OLAT 6 layout, the bunch of functionalities and of course the Swiss chocolate we use to offer.
Furthermore, Christian Franck was interviewed for a video podcast which will hopefully be broadcasted soon.
(11.02.2009) People all over the world are working with OLAT. We wanted to know what users think about OLAT and started a page
What Users say about OLAT. If you like to contribute with a statement,
send us a photo, your name and job description plus a comment about OLAT.
(02.02.2009) We have been working on a scalable OLAT-solution since nearly two years now. Scalable means that you can install OLAT not
only on one server but on many servers and thus serve a lot more concurrent users than with only one installation. This morning
we released OLAT 6.1 at the University of Zurich and the new installation consisting of three OLAT server-nodes is successfully
running since five hours now. We will have to monitor it during the next days and then decide when to do a public OLAT 6.1
release. Furthermore we are still waiting for some translations to be done before we can release OLAT 6.1 for our community.
So it might take another three or four weeks. We'll keep you updated!
(21.01.2009) Google announced their Google Summer of Code 2009 project and it is most probable that the University of Zurich will be a
mentoring organization again. As in 2008 we will participate again with our two eLearning open source projects OLAT and
eLML. Interested students from all over the world will be able to apply for a grant for one of our projects. Please have a look
at our
GSoC project list and start contacting us if you are interested in particpating. The starting date for submitting applications has not yet
been published but it will proably be in late March 2009.
More information here...
(23.12.2008) Consider it a Christmas gift: "OLAT team goes social networks" :-) You will find more information
here.
(17.12.2008) Check out our brand new broschure (A5, 4 pages), the flyer (A6) and poster (A0) that we created for the Online Educa conference.
A fresher OLAT screen design also required new print products. Then we also uploaded our new 3D logo in various sizes. Please
have a look at the
material section and contact us if you need the original Adobe InDesign or Illustrator files.
(09.12.2008) OLAT was again present at this years
Online Educa 2008 in Berlin. Our team consisted of members of the University of Zurich (Sandra Roth, Lavinia Dumitrescu and Joël Fisler), Frentix
GmbH (Christian Franck) and from the Bildungsportal Sachsen (Frank Richter). We had a lot of interested e-learning experts
passing by and getting impressed when we gave them a short OLAT-demonstration. "This looks a lot cleaner than the cluttered
Moodle-workspace" was something we heard quite often :-) Furthermore we had someone from the Educa-staff passing at our stand
and interviewing Joël Fisler about OLAT and eLML. You can find this interview on the
Online Educa Podcast page. In the last session of the conference Andreas Wittke from
Oncampus and Joël Fisler (University of Zurich) were holding a presentation about "
Mega Content Transformation with Open Source Educational Content Project eLML (eLesson Markup Language)". Surprisingly there were still over 30 participants attending this session, which is not bad for being the last presentation
at nearly 6pm on Friday afternoon. For more pictures you can visit our new Facebook group
OLAT. If you missed the Online Educa you can visit us at our next event, the
Learntec in Karlsruhe starting on February 3rd 2009.
(04.12.2008) We had to release OLAT release 6.0.7 today because there were some bugs in the chat and notification system we needed to
fix! But there are more bug fixes and further improvements included into this new OLAT release. For a full list of bug fixes
and improvements check the
release notes.
Continue to download section...
(20.11.2008) Today OLAT release 6.0.6 (including unplublished 6.0.5 release) was published. The new release contains improvements of the
HTML editor, SCORM and IMS CP improvements, support for Java 1.5 and a lot of bug fixes! For a full list of bug fixes and
improvements check the
release notes.
Continue to download section...
(05.11.2008) Guido Schnider and Joël Fisler participated at the
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Mentor Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. The summit took place Saturday and Sunday, 25./26. October 2008, and was
held in the spirit of an
unconference. It was very interesting to particpate at various spontaneously organized workshops and to talk to and meet some of the 200
mentors from over 150 open source projects that participated at this years GSoC. For pictures check out the
Mentor Summit 2008 photos at Flickr and for more information about GSoC 2008 and the upcoming GSoC 2009 visit
OLAT GSoC page.
(04.11.2008) We added OLAT to the open source network Ohloh.net. So please visit our
OLAT@Ohloh.net page and add yourself as an OLAT user (we want to see that "I am using OLAT"-list growing fast!), leave a comment, add yourself
to the development team etc. Become active and make us proud :-) Furthermore we added some Ohloh-Widgets throught our website
(e.g on the
download or on the
development page).
(03.11.2008) Due to various reasons the public release of OLAT 6.0.5 (currently only running at UZH) has not been published yet. Since
we planned a 6.0.6 for November 18th we will cancel the public release 6.0.5 and you have to wait for 6.0.6. Sorry...
(29.09.2008)
At last weeks
Open Expo in Winterthur OLAT received the Swiss Open Source Award 2008 in the category "Swissness". According to the jury members OLAT
is one the biggest Swiss E-Learning projects. We are very happy to have received this open source award and that the jury
recognized our nearly 10 years of hard work. The prize was a golden keyboard together with CHF 1600.-. Check the
Swiss Open Source Award Website for more information or read the article published in the
PCTipp or
Linux Magazine.
(16.10.2008) We are currently looking for a Java developer and an E-Learning specialist. Please check the "Jobs@OLAT" box on the right
side for more information.
(10.09.2008)
The Google Summer of Code Closing Event took place on September 4th at the University of Zurich. All students (or their mentors)
presented their project. We would like to thank everyone for the nice and successful closing event. A reminder: most presentations
are in German. You can find the video of the presentations and photos of the social event that followed on the
OLAT GSoC page.
So what has been accomplished in GSoC 2008? OLAT 6.1.x release will contain the results of the Calendar project (Udit Sajjanhar)
and also the LDAP end result (Maurus Rohrer). Also ready for publication are the two eLML projects "Template Builder" and
"DocBook Converter". They will be published in late September 2008. Not yet ready for production are Blog (Thomas Bernhart),
CP Editor (Sergio Trentini), Tagging (Marcel Karras), and Clipboard (Mayank Jain). They are very valuable prototypes enhancing
the OLAT project and probably ready for release 6.2.
(12.09.2008) The OLAT team has released OLAT 6.0.4 today. The release 6.0.4 contains as usual many bug fixes. But we also implemented
some improvements: Better print support, optimized calendar portlet and some security issues were fixed.
Continue to download section...
(28.08.2008) The OLAT team has released OLAT 6.0.3 today. This release includes many bug fixes for OLAT 6.0 and the final layout (new
icon set etc.) and the updated user manual in four languages. Have a look at the list of chances in the
OLAT 6.0.3 release notes.
Continue to download section...
(27.08.2008) As most of you probably know the OLAT project participated as a mentoring organization at the
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. GSoC will officially end on September 1st and we will have a public closing event on Thursday, September 4th 2008
from 4 to 6pm (Swiss time). All students will present their projects and talk about their experiences with GSoC and the OLAT
mentors. The presentation will be held at the Irchel Campus of the University of Zurich in room
Y27-H35/36Y35-F51 (new location!!!) and will be available as videostream afterwards. The GSoC Closing Event is a public event open to everyone
(E-Learning staff, students interested in GSoC 2009 etc.) and will be followed by a social event - Barbecue and beer - in
the Irchelpark afterwards. Please
download the PDF file for more information.
(05.06.2008) The OLAT team has released OLAT 6.0 today. This is a major release including new functionality as well as bug fixes. The
most important new features of the 6.0 release are listed below. For a full list of changes please refer to the
OLAT 6.0 release notes. Many thanks to the OLAT community that helped finding bugs, which helped make this release more stable. The community also
did a great job in updating several language translations.
Continue to download section...
(28.05.2008) Last week Bartek Gajc from Olsztyn (Poland) released a translated version of the olat.org website. You can find the OLAT
website in Polish at
www.geomatikk.pl/olat! Thanks to Bartek and his GEOMATIKK-team!
(21.05.2008) We are closing the last bugs and the next big OLAT release version 6.0 seems ready for public release. We plan to have OLAT
6 published here on Tuesday, June 3rd 2008. OLAT 6 will be based on a new layout - created with the
CSS-framework YAML - and will offer some new features presented when the release is ready.
(19.05.2008) Swiss GSoC mentors and students met on May 7th for a "Bonding Drink" at the MyPlace Café in Zurich. We were around ten people,
mostly students and mentors from the OLAT or eLML project. Although the meeting was published on the Google list we had only
one guest from another project: Donat Agosti from the
Plazi project. Thanks for joining! We plan to do a next event in summer, maybe a barbecue in our beautiful University Irchel park. Please
send us a note if you are interested in participating. Everybody is welcome!
Check out the pictures...(22.04.2008) This year OLAT is participating for the first time in the
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project and has been chosen by Google to be one of the mentoring organizations. The OLAT team is very happy to have a total
of 8 student proposals accepted. The accepted students are citizens of Switzerland, Germany and India.
Read on for more information...
(02.04.2008) The successful start of the first OLAT conference in Zurich consisted of five fully booked workshops. We discussed topics
like usage, deployment, and extension of OLAT with the participants and tried to give a deeper insight into layout issues
and content creation for OLAT. After the quite challenging workshops, we needed to relax at the bistro MyPlace. In the following
two days we listened to 45 talks on various issues around OLAT like use cases, online assessments, usability, recent and future
development, content creation and - at a special track - e-learning in medicine. This fascinating but exhausting "business"
part was framed by social events: conference diner and party at the "Giesserei" on Thursday, and a fondue diner in a sylvan
hut full of atmosphere on Friday. All the 170 conference participants mainly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland contributed
in one way or another to the great success of the OLAT conference. We, the OLAT team, would like to thank all of them.
We are looking forward to reading your posts on the OLAT lists and seeing you again soon.
Continue... (Streams, Podcasts, Photos)(18.03.2008) OLAT has been accepted at the
Google Summer of Code program. The GSoC initiative offers students the possibility to work for open source projects and be paid by Google (around $5000
for a summer job). The aim of GSoC is to foster open source projects and to recruit talented programmers. Students interested
in receiving such a grant should apply until
March 31st April 7th, 2008 (new deadline)!
(10.03.2008) The registration for the first OLAT conference (including the DOIT session "E-Learning in Medicine") closed on Friday, 7th
of March 2008. We are happy to announce that a total of 170 participants 200 participants (updated 26.3.2008) registered mainly from Switzerland (70%), Germany (20%) and Austria (5%). Another 5%
are from various countries like Poland, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine etc.
(30.01.2008) Since today the final program for the first international OLAT conference is online and can be downloaded
here. The conference starts on Wednesday (March 26th, 2008) with pre-conference "hands-on"-workshops on OLAT and
eLML. The official conference starts on Thursday (March 27th, 2008) with two sessions: One session on OLAT use cases, online assessments
and usability, the parallel session - hosted by our partner "DOIT" - on "E-Learning in Medicine". On Friday (March 28th, 2008)
there will be a session for users (use cases and content creation) and a second session for developers on "Proprietary Development
for OLAT". In the evenings there will be social events where you can meet peers and colleagues or talk with the OLAT team.
Most presentations in both rooms will be recorded and be available after the conference via "streaming video" at our conference
website. Most of the presentations will be in GERMAN. Depending on the number of English native speakers we will offer a simultaneous
translation. Please let us know if you don't speak German at all!
Visit our
conference website to register. You should register until the end of February 2008 but - as seats are limited - we are giving them away on a
first come, first served basis.
(28.01.2008) Together with Frentix and BPS GmbH the OLAT team will be at the
Learntec in Karlsruhe. If you plan to attend this conference feel free to visit us at
booth C31.
(26.11.2007) We are very happy to announce the first international OLAT conference from March 26th to 28th 2008 in Zurich, Switzerland
(22.11.2007) The latest bug fix release for OLAT 5.2. is available: 5.2.3. It contains many fixes for performance improvement under high
load and instant messenger bugs. The latest release also contains a bug fix for the calendar and the change from 2007 to 2008.
We therefore strongly recommend that you update your OLAT 5.2 release to 5.2.3!
(18.11.2007) Together with Florian Gnägi from Frentix GmbH the OLAT team will be at the
Online Educa in Berlin. If you plan to attend this conference feel free to visit us at booth A24.
(24.09.2007) Last week we released OLAT 5.2.2 a minor bug fix release for OLAT 5.2.
(17.09.2007) Next Wednesday and Thursday (September 19./20. 2007) the
OpenExpo 2007 takes place in Zurich. On both days you can listen to interesting speeches about free and open source software with a business-focus
on Wednesday and a technology-focus on Thursday. Together with
eLML we will have a booth/stand from 9am to 5pm with information about eLML. Come and visit us!
(12.09.2007) OLAT 5.2 - 5.2.1 to be correct, 5.2.0 was only an internal release - has been released today which is a big step towards
Web 2.0 and usability. In this release we tried to implement the results of the usability report done by the University of
Berne. We also rebuilt the chat client using AJAX technology and updated the forum. Here's a short list of improvements:
(11.09.2007) Along with the OLAT 5.2 release the OLAT team completely rebuilt the olat.org website. Now this website is based on the
eLesson Markup Language (eLML) and offers a layout similar to OLAT itself. A lot of old stuff was deleted and new sections were added. For those of you
who are interested in OLAT please check the
about section; for those of you who would like to install and use OLAT please go to the
download section; and for those of you who are Java programmers and would like to mess with the code please check the
development section.
(12.06.2007) We are currently working on the next OLAT release 5.2 due in late summer 2007. The main topics planned for the next release
are:
(08.05.2007) The latest OLAT release contains some bug fixes in the HTML and test editor. Please refer to the complete notes to see a
full list of changes and grab your copy from the
download page.
(13.04.2007) OLAT 5.1.2 is out! It is most and for all a bug fix release to resolve problems caused by the earlier version.
Please refer to the complete notes to see a full list of changes and grab your copy from the
download page.
(19.03.2007)The OLAT 5.1 Public has been released today (March 14th, 2007). Please note that OLAT 5.1.0 has only been released at the
University of Zurich. The OLAT 5.1 Public Release is in fact OLAT 5.1.1.
(10.03.2007) One of the major Swiss newspapers, the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (NZZ), presents OLAT in its section on "Media and Informatics"
(March 9th, 2007). You can find the article "Vom E-Learning zum «Blended Learning»" online on the NZZ website. The article
is available in the
Press section but only in German.
(08.03.2007) OLAT has its own web application MVC GUI framework. The essence of the separated framework is submitted under the name brasato
framework for the JAX Innovation Award 2007.
(07.03.2007)The OLAT 5.1 Public Release was planned for tomorrow (March 8th, 2007). Unfortunately we must announce that the release has
to be deferred for at least two weeks. OLAT 5.1 was released at the University of Zurich one week ago. This server hosts more
than 25'000 users and more than 1000 courses. While the system is up and running we have found some hidden bugs and would
like to fix them before we go public with OLAT 5.1. We would like to apologize for the delay and comfort our open source user
with the fact that when OLAT 5.1 Public is released, it will be thoroughly tested and will work no matter what your setup
is. Thanks for your patience and your interest in OLAT!
(16.02.2007) The E-Learning Center of the University of Zurich has currently presented E-Assessments in its
podcast. In the last edition of the E-Learning podcast the OLAT team leader Franziska Schneider talks about "OLAT & E-Assessments".
You can download and listen to this 15 min-podcast
here. Furthermore the online magazine "unipublic" has just published an article on the same topic. Please visit the
unipublic website for more information. Both publications are only available in German.
(14.02.2007) The OLAT-team visited the LearnTec 2007 in Karlsruhe.
Joël Fislers presentation @ DevLearn 2009and so most people where even more surprised when they saw the live demo and the clean and easy to use interface. We did receive
a lot of comments saying that at first impression OLAT seemed easier to use and more powerful than many commercial and open
source learning management systems used within the US market. Joël Fisler attended also the demofest and the conference where
he was able to hold a presentation about the tools followed by a lively discussion about open source tools in education. First
cooperation plans with commercial companies and with a US university have been established and we will announce them on our
website as soon as the deals are fixed. After visiting three conferences and expos in the US and Canada during the last month
we feel optimistic that finally OLAT will start to become recognized and used in North America.
At last week's IMS Learning Impact conference in Barcelona the Global Learning Consortium announced the results of the Impact Award competition. OLAT was awarded with a "Leadership Award" for "Best Open Source Learning Platform". The OLAT team is honored to have received
such a unique award. A quote from the press release of IMS: "The LIA awards are unique in that they recognize the use of technology in context. Nominations include not only information
about the technology but how it is used by an education provider. In addition, the entries are evaluated according to eight
criteria of impact, including improving access to learning, improving affordability of learning, and improving the quality
of learning." (IMS 2009)
The Google Summer of Code Closing Event took place on September 4th at the University of Zurich. All students (or their mentors)
presented their project. We would like to thank everyone for the nice and successful closing event. A reminder: most presentations
are in German. You can find the video of the presentations and photos of the social event that followed on the OLAT GSoC page.