Application Watch for Education

This section presents applications of interest to the educational community.

uPortal

uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. This group sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional Web presence... a "pocket-sized" version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds "customization" and "community" to the campus Web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies. More at uPortal

The Sakai Project

The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community sourceCommunity source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models. software development project founded by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software with the first release in July 2004. The Sakai Educational Partners' Program (SEPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and SEPP member contributions. More at The Sakai Project

Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI)

Formed in January 2003, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a collaborative, open-source, software development project based on the University of Minnesota Enterprise System's electronic portfolio software. The University of Minnesota (U of MN), University of Delaware, and the r-smart group, founded this collaborative to open the evolution of the U of MN ePortfolio to diverse input, rapid development, and widespread use.

The OSPI mission is:

• Create and sustain leading production ePortfolio software.
• Build a software platform to accelerate ePortfolio innovation for teaching and learning.
• Influence and reflect best practices in portfolio thinking.
• Influence the movement of open source in education.

More at Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI)

ILIAS

The web-based learning management system ILIAS is available as open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Universities, educational institutions and every interested person may use the system free of charge and contribute to its further development. The software development worldwide is coordinated by our team at the Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne

ILIAS allows users to create, edit and publish learning and teaching material in an integrated system with their normal web browsers. Tools for cooperative working and communication are included as well. The current version of ILIAS offers the following features:

• Personal desktop for each user with information about last visited courses, new mail or forum entries
• Learning environment with personal annotations, test, glossary, print function, search engine and download
• Course management system
• Communication features like mail system, forums and chat
• Group system for collaborative work and organising users and resources
• Integrated authoring environment (Editor) to create courses even without any HTML knowledge
• Support of metadata for all levels of learning objects
• Context-sensitive help system for learners and authors
• User and system administration interface
• System languages: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian

More at ILIAS

Whiteboard

Whiteboard is a fully-featured and -integrated courseware system, targeted toward colleges and universities. It supports multiple departments and courses (including cross-listed courses); simple migration of courses to new semesters; grade storage, checking, and calculation; assignment submission and testing, and submitted assignment retrieval; documents; announcements; and discussion boards. It is written in PHP with a <nop>MySQL back-end, and is fully administrable through its web interface. More at Whiteboard