Dokeos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dokeos | |
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 Dokeos login screen |
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| Developer: | Dokeos |
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| Latest release: | 1.6.5 / July 2006 |
| OS: | Cross-platform |
| Use: | Course Management System |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | Dokeos.com |
Dokeos is an elearning environment and course management web application and also a collaboration tool. It is free software released under the GNU GPL, its development is an international, collaborative effort. It is also OSI certified and can be used as a content management system for education and educators. Its features for course management include content distribution, calendaring, progress tracking, text/audio/video chat, test administration, and record keeping. As of 2004, it has been translated into 31 languages (in various stages of completion) and is used by more than one thousand organizations.
The main goals of Dokeos are to be a very userfriendly and flexible system with an easy to use interface. It wants to be a tool for good learning, so that users have minimal notice of the tools and maximum attention for the content.
Dokeos is written in PHP and uses MySQL as a database. The current stable release is Dokeos 1.6.5. The developers have just released Dokeos community release 2.0. The community releases are intended to be more open, more community-based, and evolve and release faster than the original "official" releases.
Dokeos.com is also a Belgian company providing hosting, support, and services around elearning and the Dokeos platform. The company contributes back to the community by paying several Dokeos developers.
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[edit] Dokeos Tools
Dokeos contains several tools for different purposes.
- Agenda/ calendar
- Announcements: important messages for the students (contains also mail functionality)
- Course Description: explain the objectives, methodology, course material, assessment methods to the students
- Documents: a basic file manager to store all kind of documents
- Learning Path: determine how the students should browse through your course. This tells the student which steps (s)he should follow. It guides the students through your course. example: pretest, view document 1, post text, visit site X, ... With this tool you can also set prerequisites. For instance: the site cannot be visited before the test has been completed. The learning path is SCORM compatible and can import and export SCORM packages.
- Links: links to external sites
- Forums: asynchronous discussion.
- Dropbox: students can submit assigments to the teacher (instead of filling the mailbox of the teacher with mails with large attachments)
- Groups: group several users together (for a specific task for instance)
- Chat module: instant discussion
- Student publications: students can share their work with the rest of the students
- Tracking: who has done what and when and more
All these different tools are getting more and more combined:
- each group has (or can have) its own private document space
- each group has (or can have) its own private forum
- a teacher can post an agenda item or announcement for one or more groups or user or for all the students
- resources (a document, a link, a forum message) can be combined with the resource linker: you add an 'attachment' to another course resource in a forum message, an announcement, an agenda item, ...
- ...
[edit] Standards
The Dokeos code is written in PHP, using MySQL as database backend. It already supports SCORM import, and SCORM export is now in an experimental stage. User data can be imported into the system using CSV or XML files. Dokeos can add user info and authenticate through LDAP. For the next release (1.6) the Dokeos developer team is putting effort into complying with W3C xhtml and css standards. Some JavaScript is still required however, and using SCORM more or less requires the use of frames in the learning path module.
[edit] Development
The development of Dokeos is an international project to which several universities, schools, and other organisations and individuals contribute.
The Dokeos development methodology takes elements from extreme programming, usability theory, and collaborative open source development methodology, like the ideas in the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Specifically, Dokeos is very open (Be open to the point of promiscuity). There is a forum, used by Dokeos users around the world for discussion and feedback. The agenda and minutes of all developer meetings are published, and the roadmap is also public. Users can ask for features or bugs on this form. All designs and developer documentation are publicly available on the wiki. Everyone who registers can contribute.
There are currently 21 developers with CVS write access, other people contribute by sending code through email, forum or wiki.
There is a tutorial on Dokeos programming.
[edit] Adoption of Dokeos
- More than 30 languages are supported (some translations are better than others)
- The largest known Dokeos installation (Ghent University) currently has 28,696 active users and 3,604 active courses (the courses are not created in batch but the teachers decide when and if they create their course). When the results of the exams were released to the students Minerva peaked at 7,197 simultaneous users (28 feb 2006). More information: http://icto.ugent.be or http://minerva.ugent.be).
- The Vrije Universiteit Brussel has adopted Dokeos under the name PointCarré (referring to the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré), switching from a Blackboard platform to Dokeos in 2005, together with its associated institution Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel.
