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OLAT Newsletter

Newsletter 2009 | No. 1            Newsletter 2010 | No. 2            Newsletter 2010 | No. 3            Newsletter 2011 | No. 4

Newsletter 2010 | No. 4

Dear Community,

a few releases ago we started the OLAT newsletter and today we are publishing Volume No. 4! We hope you can enjoy this one as well and are looking forward to your feedback (and maybe more future contribution)! So far thanks to all of you who have contributed to this newsletter.

Have fun and enjoy the newsletter.

Kind regards
Your OLAT Team

#new OLAT release

On the 11th of May we released the new version 7.2 to the public. 7.2? What happened to 7.1? As we at the University of Zurich already have been working on the next release while 7.1 was in beta use for testing purposes we decided to release all of those changes (HG related refactoring and Maven) together with the 7.1 fixes as 7.2 public. In the end, we skipped the 7.1 (just as a number) and released 7.2 as the next major release.

Besides some new features we did some big improvements and enhancements mainly on the level of the core. It's not that users will be affected directly. Those changes are related to the development of OLAT. It is absolutely necessary that you get in touch with the new guidelines and the way how to develop features and improvements.

ePortfolio
The most interesting feature in the new release is the ePortfolio. It is now possible to collect artefacts from inside the system (like blog, forum or wiki entries), to upload files or add personal notes. The user can collect and structure these artefacts in "My accumulative folders". These folders can be released to users, groups, all users and also to external persons. Teachers have the option to integrate ePortfolio tasks into their courses and students have to collect the tasks in their "My portfolio tasks".

Info message
This great new feature is a mixture between notifications and blogs. Teachers can add an info message as a course element in the course. They can post messages for the participants of the course to inform them about news. The messages will be sent automatically to the users and as well posted in the course element like a blog entry.

Some more features in a nutshell

  • Group titles now allow more than 100 characters
  • Course export no longer mutilates titles
  • Tagging infrastructure
  • Flagging of answered questions, numeration of answers and memo fields in tests

For the complete and detailed list of what is new check the OLAT 7.2 Release Notes.

#new OLAT members

OLAT Community Server
At the CoCo 2010 we discussed the idea of an OLAT which is open to the Community. Since the beginning of this year its (a)live! What for is it?

It is the place where we gather together besides the topics of the mailing lists and its much more than just a discussion board. Use it to organize events, just like we recently did with the CoCo 2011. Create tutorials for the community, share special knowledge on how to work with OLAT or maybe demo courses and work together on the documentation.

The main language should be English, but please feel free to provide content in any other language! It's up to you to maintain this server and make it grow up. So, don't hesitate to register yourself right away!

http://community.olat.org

SouthAfrica goes OLAT!
The organisation RightToCare is using OLAT to teach nurses for the clinical care and treatment of individuals living with HIV and associated diseases. RightToCare is supported by Artmedia from South Africa.

https://proudlytested.olat.com/ptested/dmz
http://www.righttocare.org

BZG goes OLAT!
The Bildungszentrum Gesundheit Basel-Stadt started with a pilot phase and will use OLAT to offer a strong LMS to their users. The integration of OLAT is well planned and organized by the elearning team of BZG!

https://olat.bzgbs.ch/bzgbs/dmz

Art goes OLAT!
Visual Artnet is a company in Zürich offering courses and e-learning for the italian art history. Courses are available on OLAT and iPAD.

https://visual-artnet.olat.com/vartnet/dmz
http://www.visual-artnet.ch/site/index.cfm

#news from the community

Simply switch to OLAT - new Blackboard LMS Converters

Many users of commercial learning management systems (LMS) currently switch to open source systems. Reasons for the change are increased quality and efficiency of established open source LMS and the low initial and subsequent costs. However, the migration of existing content from old into new systems is always a challenge. For easy migration of teaching and learning content from the LMS Blackboard Academic Suite™ and Blackboard Campus Edition™ into the open source system OLAT, the BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH offers new converters for interested institutions.

The converter for the LMS Blackboard Academic Suite™ allows users to migrate existing content – including navigation structure and user generated content like forum discussions – directly into OLAT with minimal effort. Both, complete courses or selected course elements can be migrated – the user decides!

The LMS converter can be accessed via a web browser. The ease of use of the service is ensured by an user-friendly graphical interface. For the migration of tests the international standards IMS QTI1.2 and IMS QTI2.1 are used. Besides, various languages for the navigation structure of the new OLAT course are available. This enables a high degree of flexibility and internationality.

Recently, experts from BPS GmbH developed a second conversion tool for automated migration of courses from Blackboard Campus Edition™ (former WebCT™) to OLAT. By order of the Goethe University Frankfurt, more than 4'000 courses will be migrated including student and assessment data. This helps saving valuable course content and training history, and significantly reduces the costs and impacts of the LMS migration. Another argument to switch to the open source system OLAT!

Text: Jens Schwendel, BPS GmbH

OLAT tutorials by VCRP

Our OLAT community member "Virtueller Campus Rheinland-Pfalz" (VCRP) contributed an excellent tutorial series with nine screencast tutorials for OLAT newcomers and experts. In the tutorials users will find interesting new aspects and tricks on how to use the OLAT LMS. The tutorials are all in german.

The target audience are course authors, however there are also tutorial episodes for students which feature a general introduction into the system. While the tutorials are clearly VCRP branded, the content is not VCRP specific and can be helpful for any OLAT installation.

Topics:

  • OLAT für Studierende
  • Lehren mit OLAT
  • OLAT Struktur
  • Der OLAT Kurs
  • Kursbausteine in OLAT
  • Kurs erstellen
  • Lernressourcen erstellen
  • Aufgabenbaustein und E-Portfolio
  • OLAT Advanced

The tutorials have been produced by the company frentix GmbH.

http://community.olat.org/commolat/url/RepositoryEntry/9273346?guest=true&lang=de
http://www.vcrp.de

Text: Florian Gnägi, frentix GmbH

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main welcomes OLAT

“WebCT geht. OLAT kommt!” was the slogan for the launch of OLAT at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. On March 15th, 2011 it happened: On time for the start of the summer semester, the current version 7.1 of OLAT became available for all students, teachers and employees of the Goethe University.

Later this year, at the start of the winter semester 2011/2012, OLAT will fully replace the existing central learning platform WebCT.

For the summer semester 2011, the plan is that both learning platforms will be available for use. The content of all existing WebCT courses will automatically be migrated to OLAT by the beginning of the winter semester 2011/2012.

The Goethe University wanted to guarantee access to a central learning platform for a longer period of time (for at least five years). As a consequence of the implied high contract costs, a bidding process throughout Europe was required. OLAT emerged as the winner of this bidding process. The main considerations in choosing OLAT were its optimal fit to the individual needs of the Goethe University as well as its comparatively low initial and long term costs over the next five years. The BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH received the contract for the project launch and subsequent support for the next five years. BPS is an undertaking of the institutions of higher education from the German state of Saxony, in cooperation with the Swiss company, frentix GmbH, from Zurich.

At the moment, an interface between OLAT and the campus management system QIS-LSF is being developed for the Goethe University. When this is complete, the entering of a new course in the online course catalog of QIS-LSF will automatically cause an accompanying OLAT course to be created. Additionally, students who sign up for their courses in QIS-LSF will automatically be granted access to their corresponding OLAT courses.

The Kompetenzzentrum Lernsysteme (Competence Center Learning Systems) will support teachers and students of the Goethe University in all questions regarding the new learning platform. Since the beginning of February 2001, the Competence Center has been offering free OLAT workshops for teachers and teaching assistants. The workshops are designed for different target groups. At the moment there are two workshop formats being offered, “OLAT Introduction” and “OLAT for Former WebCT Users”. Additional workshops, such as “OLAT Next Level”, “OLAT Best Practice” and “OLAT Tips and Tricks”, and webinars are being planned.

Currently in Germany, OLAT is used as the primary learning management system at the University of Hamburg as well as the universities and colleges in the states of both Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate. The German OLAT community continues to expand and, with the addition of the Goethe University of Frankfurt, now has one more prestigious member.

Information: Kompetenzzentrum Lernsysteme
E-Mail: olat@rz.uni-frankfurt.de
Internet: www.olat.uni-frankfurt.de

Text: Victoria Kartashova & Douglas Chorpita, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

#OLAT@events: Recent and Upcoming

LearnTec 01 – 03 Feb 2011 Karlsruhe, Germany
CeBIT 01 – 05 Mar 2011 Hannover, Germany
OSS an Schulen 21 May 2011 Zurich, Switzerland
OLAT CoCo Meeting 09 – 10 Jun 2011 Zurich, Switzerland
OLAT User Day 21 Sep 2011 Dresden, Germany
Campus Innovation 24 – 25 Nov 2011 Hamburg, Germany

Again the LearnTec in February 2011 was very important to present OLAT. Many visitors were interested in the system which is now really well known, especially in Germany since so many universities switched to OLAT.

http://www.learntec.de

OLAT was invited by the Linux Magazin to represent OLAT in the Open Source area at the Cebit in Hannover. We stayed 5 days in Hannover and had a lot of interesting talks with interested people. Thanks to the Linux Magazin!

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Events/CeBIT-Open-Source-Project-Lounge-2011...
http://www.linux-magazin.de/Themengebiete/Special/Cebit-2011/Projekte/Cebit-Open-Source-2011-Projektpraesentation-OLAT

frentix has presented OLAT at the "OSS an Schulen" in the EB Zürich on the 21st May 2011. In addition to the presentation in the coffee breaks frentix held a workshop with the topic "ePortfolio mit Opensource" where the focus was on the eportfolio which is now integrated in OLAT.

http://www.ossanschulen.ch/weiterbildungstagung-2011
http://prezi.com/yrq5ukwg_di1/eportfolio-mit-opensource

OLAT CoCo 2011

The third OLAT Core Community Meeting took place on the 9th and 10th of June 2011 at the University of Zurich. As far as we can tell, and say from the feedback of the participants: it was a really nice and informal event.

For all interested on what happened, was lectured and/or discussed feel free to access the CoCo2011 course on the Community OLAT (all in german). There you'll find the participants list, the twitter feed, protocols and the slides of the lectures and workshops.

On Thursday we had the keynotes by our customer and developer team leaders. Just to give a comprehensive view on the refactoring which is already taking place. Have a look at the session streams.

After a really nice evening at the Zurich lake we started the Friday with separated sessions. Have a look at the complete program and the protocols on the Community OLAT. Thanks to the team of the University of Macerata participating via a tele-presentation. That worked really well!

And not to forget to mention the closing social event that was also really nice and eased. Have a look at the pictures on our flickr channel.

#how to...

Install OLAT 7.2

Not long ago we replaced CVS with Mercurial which resulted in changes to the working practices of OLAT. With the latest Release OLAT 7.2 the installation process is slightly different!

We encourage all of you to switch over to the OLAT 7.2 Release. The whole Update process after new changes is much more easier with the Mercurial history. Read the installation documentation for more informations.

Integrating OLAT with the University of Innsbruck Campus Management System

The Department of "New Media and Learning Technology" implemented OLAT at the University of Innsbruck (UIBK) in 2010.

During installation we made a few decisions about the way OLAT gets used at the Unversity of Innsbruck:

  • courses get created from data delivered by the Campus Management System (CMS)
  • all the tutors and assistents have to be automatically assigned to the courses they work in
  • all the students have to be automatically assigned to the courses they participate
  • all of the members of the University of Innsbruck (students and employees) have to be created and maintained in OLAT with all the information available

These decisions made it necessary to develop software for the integration of OLAT into the local CMS. In this article we will introduce this software and tell how we achieved the desired range of functions.

The local systems

The UIBK Campus Management System consists of a number of distinct software applications and we have to deal with three of them to achieve our goals:

  • the LDAP server doing the authentication for all the applications at the University of Innsbruck
  • the user administration application called UVW
  • the study administration application called VIS

Unfortunately we need all of these applications as they provide the required information and behaviour only separate:

  • the LDAP server can be used for authentication in OLAT but it offers no information on the users
  • the UVW offers all the person related information for all the members of the University of Innsbruck
  • the VIS offers all the study related information for the members and all the course information

Considerations

Before designing the software we had a few preconditions to consider:

  • there are about 4.500 employees working and about 26.000 students studying at the University of Innsbruck
  • every autumn about 4.000 freshmen register at UIBK
  • every term up to 4.500 new courses get generated in VIS and up to 30% of them will get an OLAT course
  • exams will be accomplished in OLAT for about 40% of these courses
  • applying for courses and exams is done in VIS via groups, for every course we at least create two OLAT learning groups
  • students can take an exam for three terms
  • OLAT data has to be updated at least daily

So every day we have to:

  • synchronize person related and study related data of about 30.000 people
  • synchronize lecturers and tutors for about 1.500 courses
  • synchronize students registrations for about 7.000 groups connected to 3.500 courses

With this data in mind, we implemented the software the following way.

Implementation: Handling employees and students

OLAT has a built in feature to synchronize its users with an LDAP server. The LDAP server at the University of Innsbruck only delivers user account names and email addresses, which is far to less information for an OLAT account. We therefore had to create OLAT users on our own with information from UVW and VIS and use the LDAP server for authentication only.

As we have to synchronize about 30.000 users every day and we need to create about 4.000 freshmen every autumn we decided against using the REST interface for creation and synchronization of users. Instead we extracted all the user related classes from OLAT and use them for handling users and their homepages on our own. While this means that we have to check for changes in source code with every OLAT version, we achieve fast creation and synchronization of all the users without putting load on OLAT, in fact even without the need of OLAT operating.

Additionally we can adjust the appearance of user data in OLAT. For example, according to our department for data protection, we have to initially hide the users email address on the visiting card. As we create the users homepage on our own during user setup this can easily be achieved.

Implementation: Handling course registrations

For nearly every course created in OLAT a responding course exists in the VIS application, and in the VIS application also all the registrations for a course are handled. There are at least two groups existing for every course – one for the course registrations itself and one for the exam registrations of the course.

For every group in VIS we create a learning group in OLAT via REST and add the lecturers and tutors as tutors to that group. Synchronizing the students registrations is not done via REST due to performance considerations. As the lecturers have to approve the registrations for their courses at the beginning of a term tens of thousands of registrations need to be created in a short period of time. And during a term all of these registrations need to be synchronized daily. Thus we took the same approach as with synchronizing user data – we extracted the group membership classes from OLAT to be able to create and delete registrations outside OLAT.

What needs to be done further?

The software described above is in use for two terms by now and has proven to be a stable solution. However as with every software system, enhancements are already planned for the next terms:

  • at the moment course creation is done manually, with winter term 2011/12 we will adopt a course wizard commissioned by UIBK that uses VIS data during creation of an OLAT course
  • if a user is marked as lecturer in VIS, she/he should automatically get an author in OLAT
  • automatically created OLAT learning groups should be made "read only" in OLAT
  • we start using Shibboleth in winter term 2011/12, user handling has to be enhanced for that
  • the OLAT catalog gets synchronized with the VIS course catalog

Conclusion

Using an open source LMS turned out to be very helpful while integrating it with the Campus Management System at the University of Innsbruck. Simply extracting parts of OLATs source code to be able to create applications working with OLATs data directly would not have been possible with a closed source LMS. We also appreciated working with the REST API and we are looking forward to implement the catalog synchronization with it.

Text: Mag. Thomas Haselwanter, University of Innsbruck

#imprint

OLAT Team
University of Zurich
http://www.olat.org
info@olat.org

If you like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a message to newsletter@olat.org

If this newsletter was forwarded to you and you want to subscribe to it, send a message to newsletter@olat.org



Newsletter 2010 | No. 3

Dear Community,

There you are: issue 3 of the OLAT newsletter. Get information about the latest Release 7.0, what and who is new in the community, along with some fresh HOWTOs.

Have fun and enjoy the newsletter.

Kind regards
Your OLAT Team

#new OLAT release

On the 28th of September the new version 7.0 went public. This is a major release as there are some essential improvements and enhancements as well as many new features and components.

First of all the installation of OLAT is now significantly easier for productive use. There is no need to download the source code anymore. Just take the WAR file and deploy it in your Tomcat Servlet engine.

For quite a while now we have tried to make OLAT more modular and pluggable. With OLAT 7 we are closer to this goal. You can now integrate remote tools and content using the IMS Basic LTI interoperability standard. Read more about this in the section #How to...

The integration of a QTI 2.1 test engine is now possible by means of the ONYX plug-in provided by the BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH, which is part of our core community. Read more about this in the section #News From the Community.

OLAT can now be integrated easily into an existing IT infrastructure due to the new REST API (beta). Its addressability secured by a URI ensures all kinds of web services in a simple and standardized way for the majority of our clients.

As regards content, OLAT 7 provides a course wizard helping you to easily create a course. This wizard guides you through basic configurations, feasible course elements as well as catalog entries.

Some more features in a nutshell:

  • It is now possible to attach files to a user’s visiting card, to an e-mail form of a group or course.
  • We have improved the LDAP module; it is therefore possible to synchronize large LDAP directories and to operate OLAT in cluster mode.
  • As regards the browser, we have improved the caching of course media resources in order to reduce the network load.

For a complete and detailed list of what is new please check the OLAT 7.0 Release Notes.

#new OLAT members

The Universities of Innsbruck, Kiel and Frankfurt as well as the state of Rhineland-Palatinate started to introduce OLAT last month. As standard practice the LMS already established and other learning tools can still be used but more often after a transitional period of time only OLAT will still be supported.

All these universities provide a similar service for their faculties, staff and students. One central department offers consulting and training, helps to integrate new teaching and learning methods, and supports the production of digital media and e-learning components. Above all it provides an e-learning portal with integrated sub-applications and one main LMS (in the future).

The University of Innsbruck was founded in 1669 and is currently the largest education facility in the state of Tyrol. With more than 25.000 students it is the second largest university in Austria. Its eCampus is the central learning platform of the University of Innsbruck as well as of the Tyrolean Education Service, and is hosted by their IT-Services.

Founded in 1665 the University of Kiel with its 23.000 students is the largest, oldest, and most prestigious university in the state of Schleswig-Holstein today. The new department of e-learning coordination and media was established in 2009 and is in charge of the introduction of new media and e-learning in classroom teaching.

The University of Frankfurt was founded in 1914 through private funding and is one of the major institutions of higher education in Germany. With 39.000 students it is also one of the biggest German universities and provides a wide range of faculties. Since 2003 e-learning activities have increased significantly at the University of Frankfurt. Today, several e-learning services are hosted and provided free of charge by the university computing center.

The federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate has established OLAT as another LMS for all of its universities. All e-learning services are hosted by the Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate. As a scientific institution of higher education it has contributed effectively to e-learning and the possibilities of the Internet in higher education and teaching since 2000. At the moment there are up to 110.000 students enrolled at all twelve universities in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

#news from the community

Further integration of the REST API (beta)

The team of the UZH spin-off frentix has led the way to integrate the REST API (beta) into OLAT. Their latest development for 7.0 enables you to work also with JSON and XML. And there will be many more possibilities to come!

Future use cases could be:

  • Extension: JavaScript program with an optimized input mask
  • Connection: External application for school administration synchronizing users, groups, and courses
  • Integration: A corporate portal displaying a course list along with a direct access to the courses offered (Single Sign-On)
  • Migration: Script to import courses and content directly from other LMS
  • Other interfaces: A Mobile Client for iPhone and Android (in development)

ONYX: Enhanced assessments based on IMS QTI 2.1

With OLAT 7.0, the fully-featured test suite ONYX has been made available for the public as an optional add-on to OLAT. ONYX was developed by BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH, our most active German partner in the OLAT community. The test suite comes with different modules for editing, answering, scoring, and analyzing assessments and results. ONYX is extra software which has to be installed along with OLAT; however, with OLAT 7.0 all necessary changes for a user-friendly and seamless integration are included. For security and data protection reasons, all test packages and results - described in the latest IMS QTI 2.1 format - are stored within OLAT.

Small installations can use one central installation of all required ONYX modules, provided by BPS, to start testing this new assessment component with little effort. BPS has planned to provide a new version of ONYX in March 2011, which will support item databases and dynamic test items, etc. For further information please go to http://onyx.bps-system.de/en

#OLAT@events: Recent and Upcoming

FrOSCamp 17 – 18 Sep 2010 Zurich, Switzerland
Congresso Nazionale SIe-L 20 – 22 Oct 2010 Milano, Italy
Innovations in Medical Education, Medical Simulation and E-learning 28 – 29 Oct 2010 Posen, Poland
OLAT User Day 17 Nov 2010 Hamburg, Germany
Campus Innovation 18 – 19 Nov 2010 Hamburg, Germany
Online Educa 2011 01 – 03 Dec 2010 Berlin, Germany
LearnTec 01 – 03 Feb 2011 Karlsruhe, Germany
Professional Learning 13 – 14 Apr 2011 Zurich, Switzerland

Please find a short report below on the OLAT User Day at the University of Hamburg:

This year’s OLAT User Day was held on November the 17th in Hamburg preceding the Campus Innovation. Established as well as new OLAT users reported on their hands-on experience and presented teaching as well as learning scenarios focusing on how to use OLAT. All lectures and workshops were held in German. For further details...

http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/community_userday.html
http://www.campus-innovation.de
http://www.olat.de/userday

#how to...

...integrate external learning tools into OLAT

OLAT 7 provides the IMS Basic LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard. This allows you to integrate remote tools and content into any other LMS. Consider it as an extension of our older "tunneling" feature "External page". It enables a seamless connection of web-based content, applications or tools hosted externally. LTI handles authentication, etc., to ensure privacy and restrict access to specific users.

Within the OLAT course editor you can add a “LTI page”. In addition to the usual features “Title and description”, “Visibility”, and “Access” the configuration provides another one: the “Page content”. Here you can indicate an URL to be referenced along with its key and password. When this LTI page is selected in the course navigation, any user data, course information or keys will be transferred to the embedded application. Of course, it is password-controlled and operates in the background. This application will check access rights and grant access only with a valid key.

Find more information on the project’s homepage: http://www.imsglobal.org/lti

...work with time limits in tests or questionnaires

Time limits can be set at three levels: at the test, section, and question level. Time limits regarding the test and section level can be set in “Settings”; time limits regarding the question level can be set in the tab "Meta data".

If a test has a time limit this will be indicated by the hourglass icon displaying the time total and the time elapsed.

There is one problem likely to occur when choosing a long period of time at the question level. Any user has a session timeout. If a session limit is exceeded a user will have to login again. It is then possible that answers are lost or tests no longer available according to your configuration!

If you want to evaluate if users have passed your time-limited test (especially how long it has taken them to answer your questions) you can check this by means of the archiving dialog. The recording of time used for answering each question is not a feature of the preset archiving dialog but of the expert archiving option. The wizard in 'Archiving for experts' provides the possibility to choose a time (beginning, duration) to be displayed for each question type.

#imprint

OLAT Team
University of Zurich
http://www.olat.org
info@olat.org

If you like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a message to newsletter@olat.org

If this newsletter was forwarded to you and you want to subscribe to it, send a message to newsletter@olat.org



Newsletter 2010 | No. 2

Dear Community,

Yet another 6.x release and we would like to use this as an occasion to publish our OLAT newsletter no. 2! Actually this is not just a maintenance release but it also will be the last 6.x release. Since we plan to make some major changes we have decided to pass on to 7.x for the next summer release!

But first things first! Read more about the latest Release 6.3.x providing some fine and cool new features.

Have fun and enjoy the newsletter.

Kind regards
Your OLAT Team

#new OLAT release

On the 18th of March the new version 6.3.0 was released. Some major enhancements were included and many new features added.

There are four new learning resources: podcast, blog, topic assignment, and calendar. Furthermore the notifications section has been revised essentially.

A podcast enables users to upload audio or video files that can then be made available in OLAT. Podcasts can either be heard or viewed directly in OLAT or subscribed via portals such as iTunes, to copy single podcast episodes to mobile devices. Students can rate and comment podcast episodes in a simple way.

In a blog, specialised or personal information can be easily published and updated. Blogs are often used as a kind of online diary or journal. Students can rate and comment blog entries in a simple way.

With the ‘Topic assignment’, lecturers can supply topics (e.g. for a master thesis or term papers). Course authors can appoint topic managers who can then create topics of their own. Depending on the configuration, students can select one or more topics. Lecturers are able to review the applications received and accept one or more students for handling a topic.

The learning resource "Calendar" embeds a course calendar in the course structure and thereby offers an alternative view of the course calendar (previously accessible via the box "General"). A course author can specify a date for the calendar view, for instance the current week of the semester, and enter weekly appointments. In the tab "Calendar Configuration" you can specify which date should be displayed whenever the course calendar is called up from the course structure. In addition you can set the course calendar to automatically appear in the personal calendar of your students. You can also create links to other course modules. When you configure a calendar to display a certain semester week and add links to learning resources, this calendar will serve as an overview page of appointments and tasks of that week.

In "Notifications" of your Home you can now view any changes of your subscribed resources in form of a list or RSS feed to manage your subscriptions. A brand new feature is the direct link from any notification to its resource. By default you'll see all notifications of the past 24 hours. But you can also call up changes from a specific date on. The RSS feed displays notifications of the last 30 days. Via the settings within your Home you can configure how often you want to receive emails containing new notifications.

We've done a complete rebuild of the logging infrastructure; and it comes with a new graphical score statistics tool. Read more about it at the #How to... of this newsletter.

Some more features in a nutshell:

  • A ‘peak view’ of a course is now possible in one or two tables
  • First steps towards refactoring the Group Management
  • For a better evaluation of the forum the number of written characters and words are issued per person
  • Enhanced full-text search: the full-text search is now also available within the following elements: course, forum, wiki, folders, CP, and context-sensitive help. Search results are shown in an overlay.

The most important note to developers is: Maven is now the build tool used by OLAT and we encourage you to become familiar with it. In addition OLAT uses its own Maven plugin (introduced to migrate specific OLAT Ant targets). Furthermore the Maven build process results in a significant smaller file. Have a look at the complete Logging & Statistics Documentation within the documentation section!

#new OLAT member

The Federal College for Security Studies (Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik, BAKS) is Germany's top interagency training facility in the field of security policy and offers as flagship program in its training catalogue a six-month seminar on security policy once a year. Since January 11, 2010 its new study platform is based on OLAT.

The Greek company TechNet has started the portal TechNet LMS, which is based on OLAT. TechNet offers commercial support of OLAT and assists in developing and translating it further.

#news from the community

Easily convert content or tests from Blackboard to OLAT.

For the simplification of content and test-migration from the Blackboard LMS to OLAT, the German company BPS GmbH offers two conversion tools. One of these tools converts data stored in the Blackboard HTML files (including text, pictures, etc.) into an IMS-CP which then can be imported directly into OLAT. The other tool, called ELQUES, provides an additional import function for Blackboard tests or test questions. Subsequently these tests can be converted to QTI 1.2 (specific to OLAT) or to its latest version QTI 2.1.

#OLAT@events: Recent and Upcoming

LearnTec 02 – 04 Feb 2010 Karlsruhe, Germany
Open Expo 24 – 25 Mar 2010 Bern, Switzerland
Professional Learning 13 – 14 Apr 2010 Zurich, Switzerland
OLAT Core Community Meeting 28 – 30 Apr 2010 Zurich, Switzerland
Learning Impact 2010 17 – 30 May 2010 Long Beach, California, USA
IADIS International Conference e-Learning 2010 26 – 29 Jul 2010 Freiburg, Germany
OLAT User Day Aug, Sep or Oct 2010 tbd

And some news on events in a short outline:

  • The Open Expo has been canceled for Winterthur from 2010 on. So we will participate in Bern from now on (as we already did last March).
  • There is a new Open Source event in Switzerland called FrosCamp from 17-18 September at the ETH Zurich (this is not an official follow-up of the OpenExpo in Winterthur). Feel free to participate or just to meet us or all other Open Source projects!

#how to...

This time we would like to point out a new documentation for a major revised tool and a hidden info on olat.org.

...work with the Logging and Statistics Documentation Tool

The user activity logging infrastructure changed substantially in 6.3. Prior to this version user activity events used to be written into a file in addition to each course. From 6.3 on all such user activity events are written into the database to allow easier processing later on. Depending on the traffic of the particular OLAT instance, this database can grow rather large. It is strongly recommended to monitor this table and keep its size reasonably down.

This new logging infrastructure enables you to process any logging information into meaningful statistics thus providing better e-learning controlling from both points of view, the author’s and the administrator's.

Have a look at the complete Logging & Statistics Documentation within the documentation section!

...understand the relations of tables in the database

Have a look at the diagram!

#imprint

OLAT Team
University of Zurich
http://www.olat.org
info@olat.org

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Newsletter 2009 | No. 1

Dear Community,

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.

There was one major event this year: the 10th anniversary of OLAT! And we celebrated this appropriately while and with the first OLAT User Day. But read more below...

Have fun and enjoy the newsletter.

Kind regards
Your OLAT Team

#new OLAT release

On 29th of September the new version 6.2.0 was released. Some major enhancements were included and many new features have been added.

The calendar now provides an import/export function: Import your calendar from applications like Thunderbird via an ical link into OLAT (read more in Wikipedia on icalendar). Same with exporting your OLAT calendar into an external application. Hint: Usually you cannot edit an imported calendar in the external application or OLAT lacking writing access.

You can now create IMS-Content-Packages (CP learning content) directly in OLAT. The new CP editor allows creating, copying and importing of single HTML pages. You also can export your CP for the use in other applications: Make sure you’re in the “Detailed view” of the learning resource. On the right side in the box you have the link "export content" to start the download of your CP as a zip-file.

We upgraded the integrated WYSIWG editor. The special feature that comes with this is a formula editor. No more inserting mathematical formulas as pictures is needed, just edit it right away with the "jsmath" editor. The forum obtained another upgrade in formatting: Now you can use special characters. All in all the editing is much more comfortable.

And some more in a short outline:

  • the export function for group lists is extended: you can now choose different Excel formats in a dropdown
  • in the glossary synonyms can be defined, text formatted and you can call flexions
  • notifications of new events in a subscribed calendar are now possible
  • a new course function "close" to mark a course as finished but still keep the content accessible
  • e-mail workflows are enhanced
  • some improvements in the forum: e.g. reply with quotation and an extended sorting/viewing of threads
  • enhanced editing of the user’s profile and visiting card
  • learning resources (test, wiki, etc.) can now be created from within the course editor

#new OLAT member

Since February 2009 OLAT has got a new member in its community: the University of Hamburg.

With about 38.000 students, the University of Hamburg (UHH) is one of the top 5 of Germany's largest universities. Even though its roots date back to the 17th century, it was officially founded in spring 1919. As an e-learning-strategy was formulated at the UHH in 2006 a new portal has been established under the name „MICHeL - Media | Internet | Community | Hamburger eLearning”. The decision for OLAT fell last February and it is already productively in use. From April 2010 on it will be the main LMS at the UHH.

www.michel.uni-hamburg.de

#news from the community

The University of Macerata (Italy) developed a platform-independent tracking and monitoring toolkit.

E-tutors have to spend much effort to deal with issues concerning students who are stuck somewhere in their e-learning environment. To adjust a pedagogical model, it is up to the e-Tutor to collect and remember all these issues. To facilitate this process the University of Macerata (Italy) developed a platform-independent tracking and monitoring toolkit. The idea is to enhance already available Open Source LMS to "support e-Tutors recognizing and dealing with pedagogical patterns stored in a decentralized knowledge base". The toolkit is not a feature to be patched to OLAT, but as a matter of fact OLAT 6.1 is the first LMS for which an interface is provided.

#OLAT@events: recent and upcoming

21st Century Learning 17. – 19. Sept 2009 Hong Kong
Open Expo 22. – 23. Sept 2009 Winterthur
Technology Enhanced Learning Conference 2009 06. – 08. Oct 2009 Taipei
ICEIT 2009 conference 20. – 22. Oct 2009 San Francisco
E-Learn 09 by AACE 26. – 30. Oct 2009 Vancouver
DevLearn Expo by the eLearning Guild 10. – 13. Nov 2009 San Jose
Online Educa 02. – 04. Dec 2009 Berlin
Learn Tec 02. – 04. Feb 2010 Karlsruhe

Read a short report on the OLAT User Day:

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 feedback was throughout positive.

The User Day was organized as an "unconference”. This yet young concept - sessions can be proposed and are determined by vote - did work very well. Besides previously proposed sessions, last-minute contributions were considered. All sessions and minutes, as well as further information about the OLAT User Day can be accessed online: http://wiki.olat.uzh.ch/xwiki/bin/view/Main/

At the end of the first OLAT User Day we officially celebrated the 10th anniversary of OLAT.

#how to...

This is somehow funny: often forum threads start with "I really used the search function, but couldn’t find anything regarding my issue..." And if not, most first answers point out to the search function.

There is a well detailed documentation on how to install and customize OLAT fitting your needs. Here, we would just like to refer to some basic, but important things!

...change the title in the address bar of OLAT

The title in the browser window is combined by "page.appname - page.title - browser name". First two can be adapted easily via OLAT without editing the code.

  • Go to the tab 'Administration' and click the 'Language adaption tool'.
  • Use the search for the term "page.appname" (check 'Translation key', 'Language' and 'All packages')
  • As a single result the package "org.olat.core" is shown. Just click 'Adapt'
  • By default it is set to "OLAT".
  • You can now insert your own title within the field “Adaptions”
  • Save it and you’re done

It is the same with "page.title" that is set by default to "Online Learning And Training".

Don't forget to make the changes in each language!

There are some other keys that might be of interest to you, too:

  • login.header
    title on top of the login page

  • welcome.header
    title on top of the welcome page after logging in

  • guestwelcome.header
    title on top of the welcome page after logging in as a guest

  • guestwelcome.message
    lines right under the guestwelcome.header

...adapt the design

It is possible to adapt the layout of a course according to your own design needs by overwriting the OLAT layout, which is loaded by default. You only have to create your own CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file, upload it to the storage folder and select it via "Modify properties" (in the box on the right in the detailed view).

As a matter of fact, there are many OLAT CSS selectors, classes and id's defined. Below we refer to a few of them, so you can see what’s possible.

  • body element
    With the body you can define e.g. the font, its size and the color:
    h3 { font-size: 200% }

  • headings
    There are different headings in use structuring the content. For example the heading of a single page is defined as 'h3'. Would you like to increase its size?
    body { color: red; font-family: Arial; font-size: 77.00%; }

  • background-Image(s) and -color
    On the left the course menu, in the middle the content area and on the right the tool boxes: these three are arranged like columns (left to right). You have to set the background-color to transparent:
    #b_col1 { background-color: transparent }
    #b_col3 { background-color: transparent }
    #b_col2 { background-color: transparent }

    Around these three there is a box where you can place a background-image:
    #b_main { background-image: url(path and filename) }

    Or just give all of them a unique background color:
    #b_main { background-color: dedicated color}

    You can also give each column a different color or background-image.

  • page width
    You can limit the size of the whole page width (within the browser window):
    #b_page_margins { min-width: 540px; max-width: 80em; margin: 0 auto; }

  • Hide Header/Footer
    You can hide the OLAT Header and/or Footer via:
    #b_header { display:none; }
    #b_footer { display:none; }

#imprint

OLAT Team
University of Zurich
http://www.olat.org
info@olat.org

If you like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a message to newsletter@olat.org

If this newsletter was forwarded to you and you want to subscribe to it, send a message to newsletter@olat.org