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Product Name OLAT
Developer Name OLAT
URL http://www.olat.org
Review Date January 06, 2007
Forums OLAT Discussions
Reviewer joel fisler    email    bio
Communication Tools
Discussion Forum
  • Students can receive posts by email as daily digests of subject lines or whole posts.
  • Students can subscribe to forum RSS feeds.


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Discussion Management
  • Instructors can allow students to create discussion groups.
  • Instructors can view statistical summaries of discussions displaying participation which can be used to generate grades.
  • Discussions can be shared across courses, departments, or any institutional unit.


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File Exchange
  • Students can submit assignments using drop boxes.
  • Students can share the contents of their personal folders with other students.
  • Administrators can define disk space limitations for each user.


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Internal Email
  • Students can use the built-in email functionality to email individuals or groups.
  • Students can use a searchable address book.
  • Instructors can email the entire class at once at a single address or alias.
  • Students can elect to forward their mail to an external address.
Reviewer Comments
We do not really have an internal mailing system but we use the users own email adress. But this can be configured, mass mail to groups etc. is possible, create your own profile/address entry etc. is possible.


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Online Journal/Notes

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Real-time Chat
  • The chat tool supports a limited number of simultaneous rooms.
  • The chat tool supports unlimited simultaneous group discussions
  • Students can create new rooms.
  • Instructors may moderate chats and suspend students from the chat rooms.
  • The system creates archive logs for all chat rooms.
Reviewer Comments
We use the Jabber chat and therefore any normal Jabber client can be used. Furthermore chat rooms are defined by groups so students subscribed to a group have access to that particular groupchat/room.


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Whiteboard
  • The whiteboard supports image and PowerPoint uploading.
  • The whiteboard supports mathematical symbols.
Reviewer Comments
We offer a Wiki for this purpose (which is not really a whiteboard software).


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Productivity Tools
Bookmarks
  • Students can create bookmarks in a private folder.


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Calendar/Progress Review
  • Instructors and students can post events in the online course calendar.
  • Instructors can post announcements to a course announcement page.
  • Students have a personal home page that lists all courses in which the student is enrolled, new email and all course and system-wide events from their personal calendar.
  • Students can view their grades on completed assignments, total points possible, course grade, and compare their grades against the class performance.
  • Students can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified of changes to materials.


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Searching Within Course
  • Students can search all course content.
  • Students can search all discussion threads.


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Work Offline/Synchronize
  • Students can compile and download the content for an entire course into a format that can be printed or stored locally.
  • Students can download course content and discussion group content with a PDA.
Reviewer Comments
This applies to some course elements but not to all. Furthermore we offer WebDAV support for accessing files and folders.


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Orientation/Help
  • Students can access context sensitive help for any tool.
  • The system includes online tutorials for students that help students learn how to use the system.


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Student Involvement Tools
Groupwork
  • Instructors can assign students to groups.
  • Students can self-select groups.
  • Each group can have its own discussion forum.
  • Each group can have its own chat or whiteboard.
  • Each group can be given group-specific assignments or activities.
  • Groups may be private or instructors can monitor groups.


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Community Networking
  • Students can create online clubs, interest, and study groups at the system level.
  • Students from different courses can interact in system-wide chat rooms or discussion forums.


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Student Portfolios
  • Students can use their personal home page to selectively display their course work.


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Administration Tools
Authentication
  • Administrators can allow guest access to all courses.
  • The system supports Shibboleth.
  • Administrators can set up fail-through authentication against a secondary source (e.g. the system's own database) in the event that the primary source (e.g. LDAP server ) fails.
  • The system can support multiple organizational units and virtual hosts within a server configuration.


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Course Authorization
  • The system supports restricting access based on roles and roles can also be customizedby the service provider.
  • Administrators can create an unlimited number of custom organizational units and roles with specific access privileges to course content and tools.


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Registration Integration
  • Instructors can add students to their courses manually or allow students to self-register.
  • Administrators can batch add students to the system using a delimited text file.
  • Administrators can transfer student information bidirectionally between the system and an SIS using delimited text files.


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Hosted Services
  • Hosting and support services from Commercial Affiliates.
Reviewer Comments
http://www.frentix.com


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Course Delivery Tools
Test Types
  • Multiple choice
  • Matching
  • Jumbled sentence
  • Fill-in the blank
  • Short answer
  • Survey questions
  • Essay
  • Questions can contain other media elements (images, videos, audio)


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Automated Testing Management
  • The system can randomize the questions and answers.
  • Instructors can create self-assessments.
  • Instructors can set a time limit on a test.
  • Instructors can permit multiple attempts.
  • The students are allowed to review past attempts of a quiz.
  • The system supports a MathML editor for the inclusion of mathematical formulas in both questions and answers.
  • Instructors can specify whether correct results are shown as feedback
  • The system supports proctored tests.


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Automated Testing Support
  • Instructors can create personal test banks.
  • Questions can be imported from external test banks that support QTI.


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Online Marking Tools
  • Instructors can choose to mark each student on all questions or to mark each question on all students.
  • Instructors can choose to evaluate student responses anonymously.


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Online Gradebook
  • When an instructor adds an assignment to the course, the software automatically adds it to the gradebook.
  • Instructors can add grades for offline assignments.
  • Instructors can add details to the gradebook in custom columns.
  • Instructors can export the scores in the gradebook to an external spreadsheet.


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Course Management
  • Instructors can selectively release assignments, assessments, and announcements based on specific start and stop dates.
  • Instructors can release materials based on a single criteria (date, grade, etc.) or instructors can use Boolean expressions to identify multiple selective release criteria.
  • Instructors can set up specific course content that is released on a specific date and must be completed by students before they continue with the course.
  • Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on group membership.
  • Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on previous course activity.
  • Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on student performance.


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Student Tracking
  • Instructors can get reports showing the time and date and frequency students as an aggregated group accessed course content.
  • Usage statistics can be aggregated across courses or across the institution.
Reviewer Comments
The student tracking is only available anonymously


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Content Development Tools
Accessibility Compliance Reviewer Comments
We are working hard on this but dont fully match the guidlines yet. But OLAT can already be used with eg. a web-device for blind people etc.


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Content Sharing/Reuse
  • Instructors can share content with other instructors and students through a central learning objects repository.
  • For any content in the repository, users can view reports displaying every course in the system that is currently using the selected item.


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Course Templates
  • Course content may be uploaded through WebDAV.


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Customized Look and Feel
  • The system provides default course look and feel templates.
  • Instructors can change the navigation icons and color schemes for a course.
  • Instructors can change the order and name of menu items for a course.
  • Institutions can create their own look and feel templates across the entire system, including their own institutional logos, headers, and footers.
Reviewer Comments
We only support layout customization via CSS


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Instructional Design Tools
  • Instructors can create linear learning sequences organized hierarchically by course, lesson, and topic.
  • Instructors can reuse courses as templates for future lessons.


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Instructional Standards Compliance
  • IMS Content Packaging 1.1.3
  • IMS Content Packaging 1.1.4
  • IMS QTI 1.2.1
  • SCORM 1.2
Reviewer Comments
We are working on QTI 2 and SCORM 2004 at the moment


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Hardware/Software
Client Browser Required

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Database Requirements
  • The system supports Oracle.
  • The system supports MS SQL Server.
  • The system supports MySQL.
  • The system supports PostGreSQL.


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UNIX Server
  • A Unix version is available.


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Windows Server
  • A Windows version is available.


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Company Details/Licensing
Company Profile Reviewer Comments
OLAT is beeing developed at the University of Zurich and within an open source community.


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Costs / Licensing Reviewer Comments
open source tool (apache 2.0 licence)


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Open Source
  • The software is distributed under one of the OSI-approved licenses.


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Optional Extras Reviewer Comments
OLAT supports 14 languages: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Danish, Greek, Polish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Persian (Farsi), Portuguese and Russian. OLAT is Java based and used Apache/Tomcat to be running.


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Reference Citation: EduTools. (2010). CMS: Product Comparison System. Retrieved September 08, 2010 from http://www.edutools.org/compare.jsp?pj=4&i=561