Creating, Handling and Implementing E-learning Courses Using the Open Source Tools OLAT and eLML at the University of Zurich

摘要

This paper presents two open source e-learning tools developed at the University of Zurich: OLAT (Online Learning And Training), a learning management system (LMS) used by universities worldwide to present and manage e-learning content and scenarios, to provide collaborative tools to student groups and to run assessments. And eLML (eLesson Markup Language), a self-contained tool used to create structured e-content which can be imported into OLAT. eLML was originally started in 2002 by the Swiss GIS-project "GITTA" and is now used by many universities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. OLAT was originally started as a student project in 1999 and became the strategic LMS of the University of Zurich in 2003. One year later - after a complete redesign based on the programming language Java - OLAT was released under the Apache Open Source license and made available to a worldwide user community. Today OLAT is used not only by over 40'000 students at the University of Zurich, but OLAT servers are also running in nearly 40 countries and it has been translated to 30 languages. After an introduction, the authors present both eLML and OLAT, its features but also its limitations. The paper concludes with a discussion about open source software development and a short outlook.