Open Sistemas

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

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.