OLAT

OLAT is a Learning Management System ( LMS) that supports a web application, various forms of web-based learning, teaching and moderating without great didactic restrictions. The product name OLAT is available as a made-up word for Online Learning And Training. OLAT is free software / open source and is being developed at the University of Zurich since 1999.

Development

OLAT modules

OLAT comprises many features typical of e -learning platforms elements:

Other components

Besides the typical LMS OLAT functions provides a total solution for e -learning projects. The following aspects are covered by OLAT:

Current status and future development

As a strategic LMS of the University of Zurich OLAT is continuously developed. OLAT is widely applied in recent years, especially in the European higher education area. OLAT has similar goals to the Sakai project, but compared to this U.S. initiative a longer development phase. OLAT has been designed from the outset to support campus- wide e-learning and can be compared with commercial platforms such as Blackboard or open source platforms such as Moodle.

OLAT is a full featured LMS, which is used at universities with thousands of users, such as University of Zurich: about 50,000 (including 30,000 users from other Swiss universities), education portal axles ( under the name OPAL ): ca. 40,000, the University of Hamburg: 30,000 and since the summer semester 2011, the Johann -Wolfgang- Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main: about 50,000 users.

In 2006, from the project, the spin - off company frentix GmbH emerged with the aim of OLAT position outside the University of Zurich and offer services on a commercial basis around the open-source system for businesses as well as educational institutions. frentix has remained faithful to the Open Source philosophy since its founding and a major participant in the development of the system. Due to the commercial services, the spread in companies, colleges, schools and other educational institutions has further consolidated.

In the fall of 2009, the OLAT team has celebrated the 10 th anniversary of the existence of the OLAT project. A OLAT video cooperates on the history humorous.

Other service providers have emerged from the open source community. Most of these regional OLAT offer specialized services (for example, in Greece, Poland or China). Often OLAT is also marketed under another brand, an accurate verification of existing installations is therefore extremely difficult to prove.

Since late 2009, a specially adapted version of OLAT for companies under the name of OLAT Enterprise Edition is offered by the chemmedia AG. In Zurich, the Frentix GmbH also offers OLAT solutions for companies.

In 2011 was launched by the University of Zurich a profound Refactoringprojekt and switched to Mercurial as source control management system. As part of this restructuring, access to the repository, the developer for the open source community has been locked and blocked any influence from the community. The understanding of the OLAT team regarding open source is limited since the time of publishing -completed code under the Apache License, without a community process.

As a result, in late 2011 a fork under the name OpenOLAT was launched. OpenOLAT is an alternative development to OLAT, which promotes a transparent development process and the involvement of the community. Initiator of this new project is frentix GmbH, a company that was founded by one of the original inventors and OLAT offers commercial services for OLAT and had contributed essential functions for OLAT in the past.

Awards

  • OLAT currently has the highest rating in the Courseware Section of the open source portal of UNESCO.
  • OLAT won the MedidaPrix 2000.
  • OLAT won the Swiss Open Source Award 2008. Behold.
  • OLAT won the 2009 IMS Learning Impact ' Leadership Award ' in 2009 for best open source learning platform. See.

Specification

OLAT runs without modification on Unix, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X. The requirements for OLAT are mainly:

  • Java SDK
  • Tomcat Servlet Engine
  • Database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL

The current OLAT version is 7.2.1, the version 7.3 has been announced for mid-2011. The end of 2011 a first beta version was released.

Sharable Content Object Reference Model Electronic portfolio XMPP Apache Tomcat
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