PfP Learning Management System (PfP LMS) / News: Recent posts

The Partnership for Peace Learning Management System (PfP LMS) is no longer in active development. Please use ILIAS instead: http://www.ilias.uni-koeln.de/ios/index-e.html

We have uploaded a progress report of the PfP LMS 1.0 to the documents area:
https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=23685&group_id=59446

A few people have asked me just how portable and modular the PfP LMS will be. My answer has been that there will always be *some* work involved in changing the framework (aka "web classroom") around the SCORM rendering engine, or in modifying its functions; however, it will be much *less* work than it would be if the PfP LMS were a monolithic, inextricably-linked system. Having a monolithic system may seem more attractive in the short run, but in the long run it would be much less flexible, and much more difficult to adapt to a particular institution's needs.... read more

People who enjoy playing with things as they are being constructed may like to visit http://lorentz.cmil.org/c/ . This is not an informational page about the PfP LMS; this site is simply a demonstration of the current progress of the PfP LMS 1.0 project.

At this time, of course, PfP LMS 1.0 is not functional. For example, we do not yet have portlets for course display, curriculum management, or student management. The Swiss team is currently working on the SCORM rendering engine, on which these portlets shall be based. The current efforts of the US team are being directed toward the underlying architecture of the portal framework which will make the PfP LMS available to the user. What you will see at the above URL is the learning environment, which will provide the framework for the delivery of online courseware to the learner.... read more

There was a question during a presentation this morning concerning the use of the UML diamond merge symbol in the activity diagrams:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pfplms/activity_diagrams.pdf?download

Specifically, there was some confusion among those attending the presentation between the use of forks and joins (which are represented by solid bars), and decisions and merges (which are indicated by diamonds). As a service to those who may be curious about UML and its uses, I offer these hyperlinks:... read more

Per the accepted standard # 948412 ( https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=553049&group_id=59446&func=browse ), we will use an open source, JSR 168 compliant portal framework to deploy the PfP LMS. At present there are following JSR 168 compliant portal servers:

* SunONE Portal Server
http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/portal_srvr/home_portal.html
* eXo
http://exo.sourceforge.net/
* Liferay
http://www.liferay.com/
* GridSphere
http://www.gridsphere.org/
* Orbeon OXF
http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/
* Vignette
http://www.vignette.com/... read more

I learned this morning that the Swiss team has decided not to leverage the OpenLMS https://sourceforge.net/projects/lms/ SCORM rendering engine, and to instead code the SCORM rendering engine from scratch. This is a bit of a surprise to the US team, since OpenLMS had been part of our development plan for around two years now.

Our apologies go out to the OpenLMS development team if this seems to be an abrupt termination of our collaboration, and we offer our best wishes that their project is successful.

The preliminary design documents are online, per our development roadmap.

http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/04_downloads.php

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=59446

These include an overview of the architecture as well as a selection of UML diagrams for the more important use cases and activities. More use case and activity diagrams will need to be created, but we will have a better basis for these designs after we receive the ETHZ/OpenLMS codebase from the Swiss CDT.... read more

We have created a brief document explaining how feature requests are prioritized, and how these priorities will affect the development process: http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/04_downloads.php .

We have gone through the features requested by the PfP Consortium's ADL Working Group, adding those features to the Feature Request tracker and prioritizing them. If you disagree with the priority a feature was assigned, or perhaps would like to add a new feature request or modify an existing feature request, you should log into SourceForge and make your opinions known: http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/08_trackers.php . Before adding a new feature request, please take a moment to review existing feature requests, and post your comment as a follow-up to that request, if there is one.

A quick update: there have been some changes in the development plan for the PfP LMS 1.0. The Swiss team is working on the course rendering engine, and the US team is responsible for the learning environment (sometimes called the "web classroom", although this is a misnomer). A draft concept of the project has been uploaded to the files area under "project_overview".

Here is the proposed timeline for the project:... read more

The PfP LMS support page is complete (pending the correction of the inevitable errors, of course).

Highlights include:

* Dynamically generated news and file downloads, to reduce the maintenance burden on the PfP LMS developers.

* User-friendly links to every major PfP LMS support mechanism, explaining the purpose of each and how to use it.

* Clear instructions for those who are not yet familiar with SourceForge, to facilitate the participation of new PfP LMS users in the PfP LMS user community.... read more

The Swiss development team has released an updated version of the "standard" PfP LMS 0.2. A download archive has been placed on http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/.

PfP LMS 0.2.5_US has been committed to CVS, and a download archive (and an upgrade archive) has been placed on http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/.

Upgrade instructions have been included in the release notes.

There was a small error in the "/login/index.cgi" file included in the pfplms_0.2.4_us files uploaded earlier this afternoon. If you downloaded pfplms_0.2.4_us on 2003-10-29, please download it again. The only file affected is "/login/index.cgi". We are sorry for the inconvenience.

PfP LMS 0.2.4_US has been committed to CVS, and a download archive (and an upgrade archive) has been placed on http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/.

These files were changed:

/cvsroot/pfplms/prototype02/pfplms/lib/intl.pkg
/cvsroot/pfplms/prototype02/pfplms/lib/lmsconfig.pkg
/cvsroot/pfplms/prototype02/pfplms/lib/lmsconfig.pkg.example
/cvsroot/pfplms/prototype02/pfplms/login/index.cgi

The Ukrainian CDT has deployed a branch of the Swiss PfP LMS with some interesting modifications.
Check it out: http://ucdt.ln.ua/ .

A review of the numbering scheme to be used by future PfP LMS releases, explaining what each number means.
https://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=59446

Step by step instructions on the migration of a course from one instance of the PfP LMS 0.2 to another.
https://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=59446

The existing file releases were corrupted due to an error during upload (thank you Seva, for noticing this). The corrupted files have all been replaced with working versions, which may be extracted with the excellent open spource program 7-Zip, http://www.7-zip.org/. Please let us know if you encounter any difficulties or unexpected problems.

We have created a summary page for the PfP LMS project, < http://pfplms.sourceforge.net/ >. The purpose of the site is primarily to introduce you to the PfP LMS, and serve as an introduction to the SourceForge code repository and its features. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know.

The nature of the PfP LMS is decentralized: there are parallel development projects under way in Switzerland, the United States, and elsewhere. As these various development efforts begin to mature, the best parts of them will be shared and eventually incorporated into the core codebase maintianed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ).

In order to make it easier to tell one "v1" from another, we have given the name "Mirage" to the development project hosted here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pfplms/ . We hope that Mirage will become a solid source of good ideas which will be worthy for inclusion in the final ETHZ-hosted version of PfP LMS 1.0.

Most developers have worked with a small set of utility functions, such as capitalize, stringToInt, or split. Often this is as far as a common library goes; the management effort spent on unit testing, documentation, and packaging is absent. The code is usually the product of one developer and hasn't met the challenge of peer review.

Apache Jakarta Commons Lang is an API, which aims to centralize these common utility functions with good documentation, high stability, and a goodly amount of peer review or arguments, as the case sometimes may be.... read more

While reusability is a noble goal of object-oriented application design, you also should focus on the importance of maintainability. By packaging classes appropriately, you can limit changes to system behaviors to fewer packages, resulting in more timely and reliable software modifications.

http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00320020924KXK01.htm

An article on Builder.com about four object-oriented "gotchas". Possibly useful reading for people new to OO design.

http://cl.com.com/Click?q=95-Xd_rQvddmlha9eIq_ndepf430yG9