Re: [edu-eu] Open learning management system

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 09:28:03AM +0000, Sam Tuke wrote:
> I saw in the edu report that people were looking for an Open learning 
> management system. I'm sure that you're aware of moodle, but I wondered if 
> you were familiar with OLAT, which to my mind is far more powerful.

I use OLAT in my university extensively (it's partly developed
here). It's a usability nightmare, because it tries to behave like
a stateful desktop application and disallows the usage of tabs and
the back button. Every other student I spoke to about this agrees
(I also talked to the people who promote and maintain the system in
our institute, but they like it, so there's no chance it will ever
be shutdown).

The user interface is also a bit confusing in many cases and you
have to a lot of trail and error search to find many things. It's
not very intuitive.

Moreover, OLAT is written in Java. I don't know whether this is a
problem for you with regard to the latest patent threats of Oracle
to Google and the Apache Foundation. As far as I'm aware of there
have been no efforts to port it to a Java implementation other than
Orcale's proprietary implementation (which they acquired from Sun)
and OpenJDK due to it's compatibility.

Moodle is also used many instituts in my university. It also has
a somewhat unintuitive user interface and I had learn some things
by trial and error. The basic course capabilities are acceptable
(sharing files, using the forum, questionares, grading).

However, the wiki system of Moodle (which is based on ErfurtWiki)
is terrible. We also use Moodle at work (research project) and I
tried to establish Moodle's wiki system as knowledge sharing tool
(our current processes are e-mail based and we don't have a real
“corporate memory” except for (printed) documents and PDFs),
but the wiki syntax and user interface are unacceptable, none of my
collegues wants to use it. It took me quite sometime to figure out how
to use the limited attachment and nearly not existing image support.

I would use none of the above, but if you can stand OLAT's user
interface, I would say it has a slightly better archtitecture (the
actual implementation of both is not very convincing, so don't ever
look at the source code), offers better access control captabilities
and has a better wiki system. Moodle has a bigger community and more
extensions. For most course things it does as well as OLAT. Moodle
2 isn't deployed at our university yet, so you should have a look if
things have improved since then.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian