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Mahara: Open source e-portfolio system
February 12, 2010 by christian · Leave a Comment
Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning ‘think’ or ‘thought’ in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.
A first guiding principle with the development of the Mahara ePortfolio system is that it is learner centred – a form of Personal Learning Environment. This is in contrast to the more institution-centric Learning Management System (LMS).
Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Unlike some pundits, we believe the Learning Management System remains a highly useful application for delivering learning. We also believe the overall environment can be enhanced and complemented by a learner-centred personal learning environment such as Mahara. Pan-institutional learner communities can also be encouraged using Mahara.
Mahara’s architecture is inspired by the modular, extensible architecture of Moodle. The Mahara team has also been heavily involved in the Moodle community, with recent work mostly focused on Moodle Networks. Similarly, Mahara systems can be networked together as well having single sign-on from Moodle 1.9 upwards. In a sense, we see Mahara as a ‘sister’ application although the two systems are not required to go together.
Going forward, Mahara will continue to evolve as a ‘pluggable’, modular ePortfolio system designed to leverage Web 2.0 web services and built with interoperability in mind.
Website: http://mahara.org/
Moodle: Course Management System (CMS)
February 7, 2010 by christian · Leave a Comment
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.
The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:
- Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
- Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
- Many of Moodle users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.
Website: http://moodle.org/
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The goal of this website is to give an end to end open source solution for a typical small company including Telephony, Document management, Customer Relation Application, Networking, Remote access, Desktop solutions and so on.
Although only the tools/applications have been listed on the website for the moment, a complete network diagram and individual how-to articles will follow.
Please note that for most of the installation instructions, we will not re-invent the wheel. A large number of very competent experts have already written how-to articles, we will just refer you to those. We will only document the missing links between the different components or if we feel that some installations could be better documented.
The KinDev team.
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Please note that the text for each of the blog post is taken from their respective websites. The KinDev team have experimented with those tools at different occasions. Your need and requirements could be different than the ones identified by our team for a specific situation, please take the time to read and understand the tool/application features before starting to install in a production environment.
We hope that you will have as much fun as we have discovering, installing and using those tools/applications and please do not forget to donate to the respective open source volunteers that have changed the IT landscape for ever.
The KinDev team.