Open Sistemas

The project consisted on the development of interactive contents and games for learning the English language through contents provided by Vaughan. Contents and games based in puzzles where integrated in the environment of the Univadis portal and offered a more dynamic and entertaining model to learn English.

• Identified Demand / Problem

  • MSD wants to offer English courses in the portal www.univadis.es
  • Attractive, competitive and recreational system

• Description

  • Each module is a puzzle that the user must uncover as the correct translation of the questions is done
  • Ranking between users of the portal with the best time of execution of each phase

• How the problem was solved

  • Adobe Flex is used to develop an attractive web application
  • Database with questions, correct and incorrect translations and the application interacts with them.
  • Different launching phases are scheduled so great expectation is created in the users.

• Business outcome

  • Application hosted more than four years in Univadis.es portal
  • Records of the HCP times

One of the projects developed by Open Sistemas for the UNED had as an axis their aLF Platform. The University wanted to improve their online platform, optimizing the availability, the frequency of the communication with the customer and their campaigns.

• Identified Demand / Problem

  • Provide support to the platform and new features development
  • Focus on online formative content quality
  • Content errors, navigation and accessibility problems

• Description

  • Databases not updated and information segmentation
  • Lack of specific tools

• How the problem was solved

  • Technical support team for aLF/openACS platform with dotLRN
  • Software development and adaptation to aLF platform
  • Development of Quality Project in online training

• Business outcome

  • Improvement of content quality
  • Decrease of content issues

The project consisted on the implantation, starting and training of a Moodle environment for the Inspección de Consumo of the Junta de Extremadura, together with the hosting and subsequent support of the platform.

• Identified Demand / Problem

  • Demand of a Moodle service via SaaS
  • Reliability and scalability to thousands of users

• Description

  • Corporative environment. Service of Inspection and Consumption
  • Initial training, documentation, support

• How the problem was solved

  • LAMP environment Xen virtualized
  • Moodle deployment, documentation and training
  • Support and control service

• Business outcome

  • Moodle SaaS service active for Junta Extremadura

ICEA (Investigación Cooperativa entre Entidades Aseguradoras y Fondos de Pensiones), the first association of insurance entities that was created in Spain, turned to Open Sistemas to optimize their online platform. They needed to develop extensions and system improvements, and that was what these professionals made possible.

• Identified Demand / Problem

  • Give support to platform and development of new features
  • Data saving and availability problems
  • Support service to production environment

• Description

  • LAMP environment in high availability
  • Environment containing the most important insurance companies in Spain

• How the problem was solved

  • DOKEOS platform deployment and clustered LAMP systems
  • Custom-made content development
  • Dokeos customized extensions development
  • Complete hw and systems support service

• Business outcome

  • Around 30.000 students
  • Significant decrease of content issues

Moodle is a free source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The stated philosophy of Moodle includes a constructivist and social constructionist approach to education, emphasizing that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience. Moodle supports an outcomes-oriented learning environment.

Moodle has several features considered typical of an e-learning platform, plus some original innovations (like its filtering system). Moodle is very similar to a learning management system. Moodle can be used in many types of environments such as in education, training and development, and business settings.

Some typical features of Moodle are

• Assignment submission
• Discussion forum
• Files download
• Grading
• Moodle instant messages
• Online calendar
• Online news and announcement (College and course level)
• Online quiz
• Wiki

Moodle's infrastructure supports many types of plug-ins:

• activities (including word and math games)
• resource types
• question types (multiple choice, true and false, fill in the blank, etc)
• data field types (for the database activity)
• graphical themes
• authentication methods (can require username and password accessibility)
• content filters

OpenSistemas and Moodle

During the last years, Open Sistemas has positioned as one of the major Moodle integrators in Spain. Moodle is for us not only a training platform, but a whole learning environment used to launch new products and services thanks to its extensions, the huge amount of functionalities and plugins that can be used and the great popularity of the environment in the educational community, as a reference solution.

Contact with us if you wish to obtain more information regarding how Moodle can help you solving your problems, or to be advised on this open training tool.

The Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is an open-source web application framework licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL. The Open Architecture Community System provides:

• A set of applications, that can be used to deploy web sites that are strong on collaboration. Some of the applications are Workflow, CMS, Messaging, Bug/Issue tracker, e-commerce, blogger, chat and forums.
• A sophisticated application development toolkit, that provides an extensive set of APIs and services to enable quick development of new applications. Features include sophisticated permissioning, full internationalization, Ajax, form builder, object model, automated testing, subsites and a powerful package manager.
• OpenACS runs on AOLserver with either Oracle or PostgreSQL as its database.

Projects that are based on OpenACS include dotLrn, dotFolio, dotCommunity, dotConsult, and Project-Open. OpenACS was originally developed side-by-side with the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), a product of ArsDigita Corporation. ACS remains one of the more famous products to be based completely on AOLserver. In 2002, after the ACS code tree forked, the Tcl code base came to be maintained by the OpenACS project.

Dokeos is an open source online learning suite. It provides all the features needed for e-learning and blended learning management. The Dokeos code is written in PHP, using MySQL as database backend. It supports SCORM 1.2 import and export. User data can be imported into the system using CSV or XML files. Dokeos can add user info and authenticate through LDAP. For the 1.6 release, the Dokeos developer team has put efforts into complying with W3C xhtml and CSS standards. In 1.8.x, JavaScript is required (light integration into the visual layer), and using SCORM requires the use of frames in the learning path module.

Dokeos implements a mix of instructional design and social/constructivist approaches. It was built corresponding to the traditional instructional design, and its structure is very close to traditional teaching (set of tools clearly marked as content creation tools), but extends this base by providing tools that encourage constructivism (forums, blogs, wikis, chat, file exchange, personal messaging, etc.). The instructional design generally improves the simplicity of use by using known teaching strategies and allowing teachers to extend on this known base by adding social tools step by step.