Subject: update about the LON-CAPA course management system
From: Burks Oakley II <oakley@uillinois.edu>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 09:13:40 -0600
X-Message-Number: 1

Greetings!  Last week, I attended the LON-CAPA users conference in
Washington, DC.  LON-CAPA is an "open source distributed learning
content  management and assessment system" -- see:

http://www.lon-capa.org/

LON-CAPA is an acronym, which stands for "Learning Online Network
with a  Computer Assisted Personalized Approach."

I'm really very impressed with this system, which was supported
earlier by  the Sloan Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and
most recently by a  major grant from the National Science
Foundation.  This project really has  come a long way and it has
huge potential.  Here are some important thoughts:

1.  LON-CAPA is a course management system - it has all the
features of  WebCT, Blackboard, Angel, etc., including a discussion
forum, e-mail,  calendar, gradebook, user authentication, etc.  It
supports a number of  different languages (French, German, Spanish,
Russian, etc.).

2.  LON-CAPA is open source and distributed for free.  It runs on
generic  Linux servers.  Note that the annual license fees for
WebCT and Blackboard  at most institutions are now many tens of
thousands of dollars, and  increases yearly, which is inhibiting
the growth of ALN.  Especially when  the licenses are often "per
student enrollment".

3.  Because it is open source, software developers around the world
are  developing and sharing code for it.  A great example shown at
the  conference was from a chemistry professor in Israel who
developed a really  wonderful set of tools for students to use in
entering chemical equations  (and for the system to check if the
equations are correct).  He also  developed a system for drawing
complex organic molecules, and checking (in  software) if they are
correct.  He then gave all his code back to the  developers at
Michigan State, and they integrated into the next release of
LON-CAPA.  Now people across the country are using these tools in
their  online courses.

4.  LON-CAPA was designed around the management of "learning
objects", such  as homework problems, videos, audio clips,
animations, applets, etc.  The  authors of these objects can
publish them, and other users can download  them directly into
their own LON-CAPA courses.  They also can build a  collection of
learning objects, and share them.  By using material  developed at
a number of institutions, this has gotten around some of the
faculty concerns of "not invented here."  Sharing collections of
objects  extends to the course level also, so that someone at
Florida State can  download the entire introductory chemistry
course from Michigan  State.  This means that there can be de facto
national standards for the  types of homework, quiz, and exam
problems that students are expected to  solve.  Unlike MERLOT, the
LON-CAPA learning objects all are written in the  same language,
which means they can be imported directly into any course.

5.  LON-CAPA is being used extensively in high schools - mostly in
Michigan, but other states as well.  Today's high school students
love  learning online - and the MSU folks say that they now have
some freshman  entering with experience using the LON-CAPA system -
what a great way to  keep students in the math-science-engineering
pipeline!

The LON-CAPA folks are interested in working more closely with the
Sloan  Consortium.  First of all, having institutions adopt this
learning  management system could lead to cost savings across the
consortium (through  the avoidance of license fees).  It could lead
to more course sharing and  exchange, similar to Project SAIL at
the League for Innovation, which was  funded by the Sloan
Foundation --
see:  http://www.league.org/league/projects/sail/index.htm ).  It
could be  used with blended learning and with completely online
courses.  It would  give educators more control of the educational
environment (such as adding  the functionality for chemical
equations and drawing molecules).  It could  address important
issues such as the student pipeline in  math-science-engineering
and gender (women show higher increases in  learning from LON-CAPA
than men do).

If you are interested in learning more about LON-CAPA, you should
feel free  to contact Prof. Edwin Kashy, who is the Co-Principal
Investigator of the  LON-CAPA project.  His e-mail address is:
kashy@nscl.msu.edu

Prof. Kashy and his colleagues have published several papers about
this  system in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and
they also have  published a Sloan-C effective practice -- see:

http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v7n1/v7n1_kashy.asp

http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v4n3/v4n3_kashy.asp

http://sloan-c.org/effective/details4.asp?FS_ID=45

Please let me know if you have any questions about what I have
written here.

Best regards,

Burks