Three Years in the Forge - Open Source Elearning Systems at Christchurch College of Education
Sunday, October 10th, 2004A summary of a talk given at the October 2004 e-fest in Wellington, New Zealand
What?
Interact is an Online Learning and Collaboration platform developed by the Christchurch College of Education. The initial system concept was based on the LearnLoop (http://www.learnloop.org) online learning system, but Interact has a completely different code base. It is an open source cms, lms, vle, designed with the intention of making it easy for students and lecturers to interact online, based around constructivist and vygotskian views of teaching and learning. Although Interact has functionality for adding and maintaining content the main focus of development is tools that facilitate online interaction and community building in an elearning context. The system is also flexible enough to be used in any context where online community building is required and is currently in use by several communities of practice for online communication and collaboration.
One of the main differences between Interact and similar platforms is the ability to easily combine interaction and content in the same areas. The modular architecture allows any component within the system to be placed anywhere, giving site administrators a high degree of pedagogic flexibility and allowing instructional designers a great deal of latitude as they design a learning experience for students.
Why?
When the College investigated course management systems in 2001 they were disappointed with the functionality that was offered for the large license fees that were being charged by commercial providers. They also felt that most of the available platforms concentrated too much on putting content in front of students, and the functions for providing interaction between teachers/students and students/students were just an add-on. Most also separated content and interaction into separate web functionality areas and provided little option for easily integrating the two. At that time the few open source offerings that were available were not mature enough for production release.
A decision was made in September 2001 to develop a small in-house system for the 2002 academic year, in the hope that by the end of that year the commercial offerings would have matured, and increasing competition would have lead to more realistic pricing structures. However, by the end of 2002 functionality and pricing had not improved with the commercial offerings, and both internal and external interest in the in-house system was such that a decision was made to continue development and to release it as an open source package. The decision to release open source was based on
- a commitment to the open source development philosophy by the developer and the IT Manager at the time
- a desire to make the system available to interested external parties without the costs and obligations involved in selling it as a product
- the need to provide backup and support for ongoing development without having to increase staffing levels and seek further funding
How?
Interact is developed in PHP/MySQL. It has a database abstraction layer so could be easily ported to other database backends. It has a modular architecture so new components can be added without the need to modify the core system. It uses a template system for page display so php code can be separated from html layout, and non-programmers can easily modify the look and feel of the system in a standard html editor.
An important aspect of system development is the use of agile development methodologies (http://agilemanifesto.org/).
The system was released open source under the GPL license. The release involved the establishment of a SourceForge project site, and listing of the project on any relevant subject directories, etc. The project has also recently established a project website at http://www.interactlms.org/ which allows more freedom to develop the site than the Sourceforge project website allowed, although the file releases and the cvs server are still housed at SourceForge.
Where?
The system is currently being used by a number of academics and institutions in New Zealand and around the world. It is also being used for several projects funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the main ones being an ICT professional development network for primary and secondary teachers, and an online community of practice pilot project for tertiary lecturers called T4T4T (http://t4t4t.interact.ac.nz)