Stuart Sim's Blog

Open Source in Education

Posted by simstu on July 14, 2004 at 08:03 AM |

Java is taking the lead in education systems development. It's easy to build and deploy fairly sophisticated applications that can be well supported. Another reason for choosing Java is its flexibility with respect to frameworks. Frameworks are important in education systems and particularly eLearning because the functional models the systems are trying to address are unknown. How can you design a s system to support the teaching of all things to all people? Frameworks are a start and Java has a huge advantage in J2EE and it's support of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures.

We'll discuss more on frameworks in the JELC so stay tuned.

Open Source Java tools in support of education are coming fast and furious and it's a great thing to see. As an architect developer of enterprise software for the community, it has been a long time coming. The commercial vendors have long ignored this important sector which has in fact driven it to adopt the open source community.

There is a mix of full blown J2EE deloyments on JBOSS to JSP Web Applications in tomcat. What's nice is that communities are beginning to share code and libraries like never before .

The two biggest initiatives to hit the education world in terms of interoperability and reuse are OKI and SAKAI - and they'be both Java Frameworks.

Reload, the Open source editor that is quickly becoming the defacto IMS content package checker for learning content interoperability. It shows how a fairly simple tool can go a long way in support of it's community.

The Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) tools from the adlnet website are all written in Java for cross platform deployment. After all these specifications are about adoption by the widest audience.

I've just discovered the CopperCore project to implement the IMS Learning Design specification in a run time engine. Very Cool!

Comments

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· The Schoolbus project Dear Sim, we are working to develop a set of tools for teachers. We are a new group and we are very entusiasthic about our aims. visit us at: https://schoolbus.dev.java.net regards, Felipe Gaucho

Posted by: felipegaucho on July 15, 2004 at 03:34 AM

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From weblogs.java.net/blog/simstu/archive/2004/07/open_source_in.html 29 June 2005