The eaSOL Project - more information

Thanks for the interest in more information about the eaSOL (electronic 
access to the School of Law) story :)

I was contracted to come up with an online education delivery platform 
for the University of the South Pacific's School of Law in November 
2001. The brief was to put something together using only an open source 
software. Up until this point, the School had been publishing a limited 
range of supplementary materials in a couple of courses, using MS 
FrontPage and IIS. Some discussion forums were offered, but a lack of 
security resulted in too many inappropriate postings and they had to be 
taken offline. There was also a concern that the unprotected course 
materials may be poached by other institutions if not protected. Thus 
the initial requirements were fairly modest - a simple content 
management system which non-technical users would be comfortable with, 
discussion forums and an easy to administer user-level security system.

After much web crawling and test drives, Zope + CMF 1.1 was chosen. The 
range of add-on products looked promising. This was pre-Epoz & Kupu, 
but StructuredText promised a simple way for people to publish content 
without learning HTML. Local roles seemed a good way to manage 
course-level access. The separation of content, presentation and 
business logic also seemed like a good idea. Despite having never seen 
Zope or Python before, we were able to get a prototype up and running 
within a week. By February 2002, we had Version One, offering online 
courses in 2 subjects using a fairly standard CMFDefault site, with the 
following couple of non-CMF products hacked into the site as well:

* 'Squishdot' for discussion forums
* 'Exam' for online tests

Of course much of the success of the project from this point onwards 
was due to the strong committment of the Law School staff to learning 
the new system and using it to its full potential. Comprehensive 
lecture notes and readings were made available on the site, online 
tests were written for each week's content area, and the discussion 
forums were regularly patrolled by teaching staff. This level of 
committment made the eaSOL system into a dynamic learning environment 
which students were happy to use.

Incremental improvements took place over the next 12 months as we 
climbed the undeniably steep Zope learning curve, and new products were 
released. For example:

* the Squishdot product was replaced by a version of CMFForum, hacked 
to remove Plone dependencies;
* when Epoz was released, it was integrated into the CMFDefault edit 
templates;
* presentation templates were overhauled in 2003 to give the site a 
distinctive look and feel;
* as CMFDefault developed, Page Templates came to replace DTML. Many 
site components had to be converted as a result;
* in order to integrate PloneChat into the site, a number of Plone 
tools were added to the site and PloneChat was hacked to work with 
CMFDefault's main_template.pt;
* some of the navigation elements, such as batch navigation were 
imported from Plone to improve usability;
* the LTOnlineTest product began development in late 2003, in order to 
replace the non-CMF Exam product with a CMF-style product. This would 
remove any need for teaching staff to use the ZMI;
* the LTAssignmentBox product was developed to make the submission of 
assignments by online students more efficient.

At the same time, students who had used the system in some units were 
putting pressure on teaching staff to increase the number of courses 
available in the system. By February 2003, about 15 courses had been 
earmarked to use eaSOL. A new online-student mode of enrolment had been 
pushed through with its own fee structure to support the new remote 
mode of study. Prior to this system being offered, students from around 
the South Pacific had to move to Vanuatu to complete their studies in 
face-to-face mode. By Semester 1, 2004, all 40+ courses of the 
undergraduate LLB program were offered in online mode.

By early 2004, it was apparent from the continued pace of improvement 
of Plone, and the eaSOL site's increasing reliance on Plone tools and 
code, that a migration to Plone was in order. The migration to Plone 
2.0.4 was finally done in November 2004, involving over 250Mb of course 
content. The LTOnlineTest and LTAssignmentBox products were rewritten 
for Plone, and the hacked version of PloneChat was replaced with an 
unmodified PloneChat2.

In order to cater for increased demand, the site now runs on a 4-box 
ZEO cluster. The School of Pacific Languages, and the Early Education 
department have recently begun using the eaSOL system for their own 
courses.

Of course, the improvement process never ends. We are now considering 
replacing CMFForum with CMFBoard; adding PowerPoint-style presentations 
based on Andy Mackay's implementation of Eric Meyer's S5; more 
improvements for LTOnlineTest; a mail-in content product, similar to 
the Moblog feature of CoreBlog and more.

I'd also really like to hear other people's stories. So send them in!!

I've also put the text of this email on the Lawtec website:

http://lawtec.net/case_studies/easol

I will endeavour to update it as the project progresses :)

Anton Hughes
http://lawtec.net

On 29/03/2005, at 9:36 PM, Paul Howell wrote:

> I think we would ALL like to hear about this story.  Please share some 
> details!
> =Paul
>
> At 04:21 PM 3/29/2005 +1000, Anton Hughes wrote:
>> The School of Law University of the the South Pacific 
>> (http://law.vanuatu.usp.ac.fj/) recently upgraded their 
>> CMFDefault-based online education site to Plone 2. From its humble 
>> beginnings in 2001, as an experiment in offering online courses to 
>> students located in over 13 South Pacific countries, the eaSOL 
>> project has been a massive success. 2 units were initially offered in 
>> online mode in 2001, but now all 40+ units of the undergraduate LLB 
>> program are available online.
>>
>> If you would like to know more, please send me an email.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Anton Hughes
>> http://lawtec.net/
>>
>> On 25/03/2005, at 12:04 PM, KurtB wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I sent this note out to another list, and realized that the 
>>> Educational list would probably be more appropriate.
>>>
>>> I'm putting  some material together to promote Plone as a CMS for 
>>> our campus to the higher-ups here at the University.  I'm compiling 
>>> a list of Colleges and Universities that sucessfully use Plone. I 
>>> plan to present that list as proof that Plone is "a good thing" for 
>>> my campus to get behind.
>>>
>>> If you know of any Higher Ed entities sucessfully using Plone, I'd 
>>> really appreciate a note telling me who theey are.
>>>
>>> Any information about how they came to choose Plone would be 
>>> helpful. I want to profile as many "case studies" as I can, and will 
>>> gladly share these findings with the group.
>>>
>>> What other university/college sites use Plone?
>>>
>>> KurtB
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
>
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> users.
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Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
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