Ajay Kumar

A Distributed Architecture for a Free Community Oriented Learning Management System

There are many great open source LMSs moodle, sakaai, etc., but we from the OSS world, generally tend to stop at the software creation. In this paper, we present a way for creating a lms out of publically hosted services like blogs, wiki, and discussion groups, and mashing it up as one complete application providing the standard tools offered in a commercial LMS. All based on open sourced mashup code.

For the users, We discuss the mechanisms to customize not only the view, but also the content for each individual reader based on his/her preferences. We also discuss the community mechanisms to allow the best content to get the most publicity and the worst content to get the least. \n\n\nAnd finally we discuss, how such a system would allow a lay content creator to gain from / monetize his/her effort, and present a case study of the community radio web distribution system we are working on for the "commonwealth of learning".

From the technologists, We request feedback and participation in the effort.

(Workshop) Free/Open Tools for Free/Open Educational Content

The educational content industry has been using very expensive systems and software for the creation of content. In this tutorial we share the possibilities of using completely open software on commodity hardware for the creation of educational content. We explore a selection of open source educational software like kde education suite, geogebra, Inkscape, Blender etc. and demonstrate the use of screen recorders like XVidCap? /Istanbul. We also show some examples of post processing the production using mencoder/ffmpeg for uploading to online repositories. We aim for it to be suitable for a linux user to be able understand from a user's perspective, and present missing links/open problems which need some programming assistance.

-- AndrewLynn - 02 Nov 2007