[Zope] zope as e-learning environment

Rik Hoekstra rik.hoekstra@inghist.nl
Wed, 02 Feb 2000 13:43:00 +0100


"Jansen, J." wrote:
> 
> (This message is also sent from the news-page from Digital Creations to P.
> Everitt, who referred to this mailinglist)
> 
> Hello Zope people,
> 
> I'm involved (as a educational developer) in a team to set up a e-learning
> environment
> for the Koning Willem I College in the Netherlands.
> We did some little experience with Zope (by Kees Roozendaal with the help
> from Kees de Brabander from the Leiden University). What pleases us (of
> course) is the fast, flexible and free way of building. I've compared some
> existing e-learning surroundings and now we have to make the choice and try
> to get the green light from our board of directors.
> Part of comparisional and part of immediate knowledge we do feel for Zope,
> but as a non ICT-expert I woulde like to have some answers/confirmations
> about the following items:



> -is it easily possible to build a learning item bank and to recall the
> (labeled) learning-topics
>  (for chancing or transfer)?

Yes, you may want to use the ZCatalog for this.

> -is it easily to make an input option for student-data from the college
> registration system?

Yes, but that may require some work

> -is student routesequency and -tracking (and gradebookfaclity) to make?

idem

> -what about getting help?

what about it ;-) But seriously. Please check out the ZSchool site
(http://www.zschool.org - it seems to be down at the moment) which is
dedicated to making a more comprising educational system for zope. There
is also a list dedicated to the development of a zope educational
system. It is called zope-edu (zope-edu@sicfa.org).  I do not have the
subscription address here. I cc-ed this mail to the zope-edu list.
Perhaps someone there could give you more information.

> and the most important:
> -other systems are claiming to work with AICC, IMS or CMI-standards
>  what about Zope?

There has been some discussion on the zope-edu list about this. You may
want to look in the discussion archives about it. Compliance with these
shouldn't be too big a problem as far as I'm able to understand them
;-/. If it's just about producing an XML representation of your Zope
site (as I understood them), it will be no problem. As yet the IMS only
seems to be a system for metadata representation,which will be easy to
accomplish in Zope (they have much larger ambitions, but that will take
a little while to accomplish -like in 2050 at the rate they're going).

Rik Hoekstra