ELMS

http://drupal.org/project/elms -- Try it out now! The abstraction of ELMS is nearly complete. If you care about ELMS implications for application development, check out drupal.psu.edu and read through my posts about abstraction (or http://btopro.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/what-im-really-excited-about/ or http://elearning.psu.edu/elearning/elms-drupal-drupal-elms )

Just some highlights:
--improved installer
--major focus on ensuring accessibility is met
--style guide that accompanies 15 newly released themes
--22 features, many of which are kit compliant

ELMS Alpha 5 came out today! https://drupal.psu.edu/project/elms

ELMS is now entirely features based and following the best practices established by Open Atrium / Eduglu / Drupal Commons. You can download the distro at the link above or check out any of the 24 other modules/features contributed as part of this release at https://drupal.psu.edu/fserver

Today we released a new version of ELMS which starts to branch it out into our vision of 3 separate distributions for education. https://elms.psu.edu/ Has all the details and has been completely redone around our new UI for the system. Many of the issues from Alpha 3 have been resolved but this is a fundamentally different system in just about every way. The focus is still on course content but the instructional designer administrative layer helps set the stage that other educational distributions can be built off of.

An initial build of ELMS: Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) was released today. The focus of CLE is two fold. The first component is to allow students to collaborate, critique, rate, and comment on each other's assignments / media. This is known as an "Open Studio" concept in the arts and we've tried to mirror it in some of our courses previously.

ELMS Alpha 3 Distribution was released today. I also shot a bunch of tutorial videos, cleaned up the issue queue on d.o., added some new known issues, and put the platform out there. If you liked what you saw in alpha 2, alpha 3 will hopefully blow you away. If you didn't like what you saw, alpha 3 will hopefully blow you away too ;)!

Download -- http://drupal.psu.edu/content/130
Tutorial Videos and Installation Guide -- https://elms.psu.edu/node/798
ELMS issue queue -- http://drupal.org/project/issues/elms
ELMS Home -- https://elms.psu.edu/

I wanted to announce here that a Public demo of the new version of ELMS (Alpha 3) can now be accessed at the following address: http://demo.elms.psu.edu/

Alpha 3 is still slated to be released by the end of the March but I wanted to get a demo out ahead of that for some additional feedback. Also, I felt the need to provide some optimism as a reaction to this post in the higher education group.

An Alpha 2 distribution of ELMS was released today. The most notable feature is that it's completely different in every way. No but seriously, it's no longer dependent on a multi-site architecture and instead is now running off of Organic groups.

In plain english -- It's really easy to install now.

Several years in the making, a distribution of ELMS is finally ready for feedback and public consumption. It's still an alpha so I wouldn't use it in a production environment but it's a good look at the direction of the ELMS distribution. ELMS has grown a lot since it was first brought up here but it's goal has remained the same: Lower the cost of entry for the creation of course materials.

Some food for thought -- Home Box is an incredibly easy to configure Dashboard creation module. I'm only posting here because I think this could be a great landing page for Drupal as an LMS. Anything that's a block can show up in a homebox display and it seems very flexible / stable from my early usage of it. You can also make multiple dashboards (different one for students vs. instructors vs. admin staff).

Alright, so I'm not sure if this is the place to start but I am. I'm looking for feedback to a concept that's currently being kicked around my office. Every summer starts the "what neat thing can we give back to Drupal and improve our courses" discussion and this was the concept that I came up with this year. I'm trying to gauge what the interest level would be if I were to integrate this as a quiz question instead of just my purely stand-alone implementation that I had originally conceived:

Here's the use-case:
* You want to quiz / self-check students on a concept