LeMill blog

At 22.5.2009 it was three years since release of our first working prototype, version 0.3 “Louhi”. To see what fine features we had working or barely working by that, see this milestone report.

I am surprised how much of the essence of LeMill these functionalities captured. Though these features were implemented three years ago, we still have been returning to them, trying to make them more efficient and robust.

The last few days have been about looking back. We’ve been revising an article about LeMill, and that requires comparing LeMill to other learning resource repositories, learning resource editors, learning design editors and such. My initial reaction was that our approach of preferring design and ease of use to learning object and metadata standards has been a good one. When services are built to satisfy some pre-selected standards, the user interface will end up resembling that standard, and as long as abbrevations like IMS-LD, LRE LOM or SCORM are not meaningful to teachers, user experience ends up being quite confusing. It is easier to convert our content to those standards than to convert those standards to good user experience.

However, there are few interesting and positive findings that I’d like to point out: Our ’sister project’ in Calibrate was the Calibrate Portal, which was supposed to be a place where you can find European learning resources coming from ministries of education and publishers. Development of that portal has been continued in MELT-project and the outcome is Learning Resource Exchange for Schools-portal. There is much more Creative Commons content there than used to be, and the use experience is much better than last time I visited.

Another interesting find was Cloudworks, an UK project in alpha state that has took simplification of learning resources even a step further from LeMill. “A place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences”, so not so far for our goals. All resources there are “Clouds” and groups or collections are “Cloudscapes” and it is up to the users and their tagging strategies to build further structures. Personally, I like how the discussions are linked to Clouds. There are no true collaborative editing of clouds yet, they work more as a conversation starters. Also, some more structure would probably be required for proper multilingual work.

Thanks for the patience and apologies for the few users who met some after-upgrade errors.

The upgrade took some more time than estimated, because we had to copy and backup huge database files and before that, we needed to make room for them. Only after these operations the upgrade could start properly, and then it took over 24 hours of computing, when all content of the media pieces was moved to external storage. Now when the pieces are out of the database, it is faster to use and all of these upgrades will be simpler and faster.

One new much requested feature is implemented: Every resource can now belong to many groups.

One another important feature is almost done, but needs still some tuning, and that is easier creation of presentations. Since that is something that is not so nice to do online, unless you use applications especially designed for it, we want to give you an option to upload existing presentations created for example with Open Office Impress and convert them automatically in LeMill. Until we get that done, creating new presentations is disabled, because we feel that the current solution creates too many unusable media pieces.

LeMill.net server will be closed for upgrade from Friday 17.04 at 15.00 UTC. This is a major upgrade that will change the way how media pieces are stored in the system. The upgrade might take up to two days. We hope to be up and running again on Sunday evening. More details about the changes will be posted after the upgrade.

We are happy to announce that LeMill community has reached 5000 members tonight when Tatiana Tarita joined LeMill. It is difficult to give the exact numbers of users that we have in different countries because many people have not filled up their member profiles. However, we can say that we have members from at least 53 different countries. The most active coutries in LeMill community are Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Finland, Czech Republic and Lithuania.

Hi,

LeMill.net was down for a while in 20.1, as we had to rebuild all search indexes and the process seemed to be sensitive for all incoming traffic, so we had to shut down access to even read-only mode. Now it is back. Benefit of that downtime was that now the searches work better with all-georgian search phrases and other less common character sets.

I hope you like it.

Jukka

One of the most active countries in LeMill community is Georgia. They have also set up their own LeMill server ge.lemill.net because international network connection is not fast enough there.

Today we noticed that the Georgian LeMill server has reached 2000 published learning resources. This is even more than teachers from 50 countries have published in lemill.net (1477 at the moment).

The Georgian state schools computerization program Deer Leap was launched in March 2005. In last two years Deer Leap Foundation has done a huge job in promoting LeMill among Georgian teachers. LeMill developers have had a chance to visit Georgia twice during that time. Next week our developers from Tallinn University will be again in Georgia to organize workshops with teachers.

Our excellent hosting service Gocept migrated LeMill from their temporary hosting platform to their actual one. Our entire cluster in now running as several virtual servers inside a single physical high grade server structure.

As performance has been an issue, I’ve been running performance tests using hammerhead. In the previous hosting setup the current version of LeMill was able to serve 20 simultaneous users with a response time of 2.03 seconds (measured on the 15th of October). With the new server, we’ve seen significant speed improvements and the same test yielded responses in 1.46 seconds, so that’s a 25% increase in speed.

The European Commission has a Learning 2.0 case study in progress, and as part of that, they are interested in analyzing LeMill in detail. They have prepared a short online questionnaire for LeMill users. We hope that you have time to answer the questionnaire.

eLearning Papers online journal has published a special issue about open educational resources. One of the papers included in the issue is from our researcher and lead developer Tarmo Toikkanen: Simplicity and design as key success factors of the OER repository LeMill

We released LeMill version 2.5 already more than a week ago, but haven’t announced it in this blog yet, because there were some problems that had to be fixed. This release comes with two new templates in the Content section and more flexible editing options.

Lesson plan template has special fields for goals / objectives, description of the lesson and evaluation / assessment. Current use of LeMill shows that in some countries teachers create quite a lot of lesson plans (see lesson plans from Czech teachers). We hope that this new template will simplify creating and finding lesson plans.

Second new template enables teachers to share information about school projects and find project partners. Currently we have quite a lot of school projects in the Methods section but at some point we plan to clean up the Methods section and move existing school projects to the new template. Then Methods section will contain only context free descriptions of educational methods that can be reused in any collection.

Both new templates have also special fields for linking related content, methods and tools. You can see example lesson plan and school project.

Besides new templates we have made some changed to the way people can edit content. From this version draft content is not visible for other users by default. This will help to keep test content hidden and have only real learning resources visible. Those users who want to work collaboratively on a draft version can make the draft visible for others.

We have also some plans about publishing ready textbooks in LeMill. One of these projects will hopefully be educational technology handbook for Estonian schools. For textbooks it is important to have a stable version that is not edited frequently. Therefore first author can now choose if other people will edit the same resource or a copy is made for them when they start editing. All the copies will be linked to the original version in a same way as translations are linked with each other.