[Zope] Zope in academic/educational/scientific environments (important)

Tony McDonald tony.mcdonald@ncl.ac.uk
Sun, 08 Apr 2001 11:33:41 +0100


On 6/4/01 7:23 pm, "Henny van der Linde" <linde@inline-info.nl> wrote:

> Hi,
> 

Hi Henny - one small comment, HTML mail is frowned on on this list :)


> We (a smal group) have build a quite comprehensive (but still far from perfect
> in our opinion) Zope based system  in wich teachers can offer websupport with
> their courses. It's a sort of content management system for teachers. Students
> can also deliver content. There are groupware fascilites and more. This is all
> realized in a rather large social sciences faculty within a dutch university.
> We have a relative large, happy, userbase but.......
> 
> It has been quite a struggle. Not the development sec but 'selling' Zope as a
> platform and facing competitors in the ,so called weblearning world. Now we're
> facing a battle with Blackboard (I'm just recovering from an attack by some
> idiots who want to rebuild the whole thing with PHP, Dutch universities: never
> a dull moment.....).
> 

Tell me about it. As an institution, we have decided to use BB as our VLE
(Virtual Learning Environment). The thing is this *does not work* for
programs such as medicine that are not wholly modular based. Factor in
additional learning requirements such as changing your curriculum and the
fact that BB is a closed system and you rapidly end up saying 'no thanks'.
If that's not enough - think about factoring in the training required for
staff using BB (our Zope based systems are so flexible that we can add in
bits that people ask for and simplify things to the extent that training
isn't necessary).

However, we are working with our BB implementation team to try and interface
our systems with them :)

> What realy would help us (in defending our system and Zope) is a list
> universities, schools etc. who are using Zope for
> educational/scientific/content management purposes. I'm
> monitoring/contributing  to (not as much as some of you I'm afraid)  this list
> and I noticed that quite some activity on the Zope front is happening in
> academic/scientefic/educational environments but I never kept any taps.

Some background: The FMCC is a unit funded by our medical faculty (which
includes dentistry and biomed science) to backup the faculty with IT systems
that the university doesn't fund, but which the faculty decides is
essential. That is, our focus is faculty based, but we do have systems that
are used by the university as a whole.

We've used Zope since the 1.03 release. Initially it was just me using Zope,
but we've now expanded to about a dozen people doing active development from
graphic design through to python and perl scripts (no products yet though!).

Examples of our Zope work that you can see;
1) http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/nle  - Networked Learning Environment project.
    (I can't show you the best bit of this site, as the material is
medically orientated). The interesting thing here is that we've been able to
deploy our finished systems at other institutions with minimal hassle.
2) http://medical.faculty.ncl.ac.uk - our Medical Faculty site. We're going
to be using part of this site to manage presentation of publications by our
researchers
3) http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk - a Learning and Teaching Support Network group
located at Newcastle.
4) http://www.ncl.ac.uk/dental - our Dentistry department

The stuff you can't see includes
1) The guts of (1) above - A database driven VLE and curriculum management
system for our medical students
2) A module outline site, which is being used to manage the production (and
printing via automatic PDF generators) of administration documents on line
(or registrars office likes this!).
3) Scientifically, our Biomedical Sciences and Genetics group use Zope

Additionally, we're using the XML functionality in Zope to share some of our
data with other universities.

There's a lot of activity in Zope land at the moment, CMF looks very
interesting, and the ZPT has enormous potential.

Oh, and to those who flipped when DC announced Perl support for Zope - this
has been very useful for us. We have a group of people here using Perl who
wanted to keep their investment - so I set up a Zope-Perl installation on
another box and let them loose. Thing is, at the same time, I provided
server space on our main box and showed them how to re-implement their
projects in Zope...suffice it to say that they've been rather impressed with
the way things work. Classic quote from a Perl-user "this zope stuff isn't
that hard to get your head around is it?", the response being a sheepish
"weeeell, no actually".

> 
> So if you are using Zope in this sort of environment please let me know. You
> can mail me direct: linde@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. If I have a list I put it on
> Zope.org so that other people can use to defend their (potential) Zope efforts
> to decisionmakers, a sort of academic/educational showcase.
> 
> Henny van der Linde
> 

I realise I've started to ramble, Henny - I hope this helps, I know that we
could not have done anything like what we've managed to accomplish if we
were using any other system I'm aware of.

Tone 
-- 
Dr Tony McDonald,  Assistant Director, FMCC, http://www.fmcc.org.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 243 6140
A Zope list for UK HE/FE  http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope