OLAT at the Leipzig University

The OLAT based activities on E-learning Environment Engineering are part of the Software Engineering research and educational focus of the Department of Computer Science at the Leipzig University.

See more about our activities in German at /de/Forschung/EEE.

The Projects

The activities are centered around two projects:

This is different to the OLAT usage scenario both at the Zurich University and the BPS – Bildungsportal Sachsen Gmb H who focus on the use of a single OLAT instance for the needs of several departments and even universities.

Our approach is the opposite – have OLAT instances one per department adapted to its special needs. There are plenty of specific education-centered administrative processes owned at the department level that can benefit from such a specialized digital support.

Within this project we set up two local OLAT instances, the BIS-OLAT Portal http://olat.informatik.uni-leipzig.de and the OLAT XMan Exam Administration Portal http://olat-pa.informatik.uni-leipzig.de.

The BIS-OLAT Portal is a standard OLAT installation (actually version 6.0.4), serves as learning platform for two departments – math/inf and phys/geo – and will be extended with a module to aggregate course information in a more flexible way as the standard catalogue provided with OLAT.

The OLAT XMan Exam Administration Portal is a second OLAT installation (actually based on version 6.0.4) that contains a specially developed module XMan to serve for exam administration from exam announcement and registration until publication and archivation of exam results. It introduces a new administrative area within OLAT, the exam office as a new role within that area and ESA – the electronic student's record (Elektronische Studenten-Akte) – to keep partly digitally track of verified information on study progress of the registered students. This information is kept so far completely in paper form in the exam office bureau. Due to the minimality principle of the German Datenschutzgesetz it is only allowed to keep this operational information under department control. This was one of the reasons that the Department Examination Committee decided that the high security requirements of a digital exam administration can only be met by a second OLAT instance separated from the BIS-OLAT portal.

A striking coincidence between structure and communication requirements of a regional cooperation platform – the presence and way of interplay of individual, collaborate, guided cooperate and public/administrative structures – with the IMS E-learning standards in general and the OLAT architectural design in particular led to the idea to test such an approach.

These developments are yet on the way. A first OLAT instance http://olat-adag.informatik.uni-leipzig.de was set up mainly for communication purposes within different ADAG projects and uses (standard) OLAT working groups – one per project – and their facilities.

History

We started our E-learning Environment Engineering activities several years ago with a development from the scratch.

Students enroled within Computer Science at our department have to complete a Software Engineering (SWE) lab in the summer term of the second year. The goal of that lab is to work on a “real world project” (of about 1.000 man-hours) from requirement analysis through design and modelling to implementation.

We set up themes for such “real world projects” that, on the one side, can be handled by student teams within the given time restrictions and, on the other side, serve our (department) needs. In the last years we could always manage that several of the competitive solutions created within the SWE labs were united and consolidated by a team of interested students during the winter term. Those students were also assigned as tutors in the next SWE lab.

This way, starting in 2003, we first developed the Uebmanager – a servlet based Open Source (OS) solution to support enrollment of students, assignment of exercises, delivery and correction of solutions.

In a second cycle, starting in 2005, the Uebmanager was refactored as the Elate project mainly better to understand JSR 168 portal technology. A cry for help from the Department of Educational Science stimulated the further development of Elate – since the main building of the university was closed due to reconstruction there was lacking a big auditorium to take written exams for about 800 students in the classical way. In short time Elate was set up and extended to meet all needs for digital exams. This project was managed by Thorsten Berger, those times a student at the BIS section of the CS department, today a graduate student at our section. T. Berger and S. Dienst completed their diploma theses on different aspects of the Elate project. Nowadays Elate is one of the flagship solutions for taking digital exams at the Leipzig University.

Since the project resources at our department are too small to maintain the development of a fully fledged E-learning system, starting in 2006 we decided to join our efforts with an OS E-learning system that is developed by a greater community. By several reasons (Java based, other OLAT partners in Saxony, interesting architectural design, clear extension concept and (partly) well elaborated extension points) we choose OLAT and set up a SWE lab scenario to study the OLAT sources and to develop OLAT extensions for different purposes. A first extension, the OLAT XMan Exam registration extension, was developed during SWE lab 2007 and consolidated afterwards. It is in productive use for exam registration at our department since winter term 2007/08.

We presented our work to the OLAT community first time at the OLAT Developer Conference in spring 2008 in Zurich. For the reuse of our developments in other OLAT instances the maintenance of OLAT code changes remains to be mastered.