LeMill blog

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.

Thanks to hard work from Jukka, and our service provider’s excellent backup facilities, we were able to pinpoint the time when the connections between resources were lost, causing empty groups and empty collections. After we had the restored database available, Jukka constructed a script to check each collection and group, and add missing connections from the backup. This process is now complete, so all collections and other links should be restored to what they’re supposed to be. Thank you for your patience!

Hello,

We are experiencing a difficult problem in LeMill, where many of the internal references between objects have been lost. This means that collections may seem empty, groups may seem to lost their content they were editing and discussions about resources are separated from the resources. This issue has hit some users, some groups and some collections while others have been unaffected and because of this it has gone undetected for a while. 

At worst case, we have to rebuild all those lost links from a latest ’safe’ backup, but we are still trying to find out when these connections disappeared and why, so it won’t happen again during the restore operation.

Please, be patient. If you seem to have to lost your collection or your group has lost resources, we are working on restoring it. We have backups. The actual objects are all there, only their connections are gone. It should be safe to create new collections and modify existing ones.

Apologies for the major incovenience, we will be reporting about our progress.

Jukka, LeMill team

We have released a small update with version 2.4.5. This release contains mostly internal changes that are not visible for end users. These changes are needed for new features in the upcoming 2.5 and better handling of large amounts of content.

We have also changed the way how resources are stored in LeMill database. It means that URL’s in the Content section have changed. Before all the URL’s in the Content section had the same structure: http://lemill.net/content/title. Now the structure of the URL is based on the content type: http://lemill.net/content/type/title.

Some examples of new URL’s:

• http://lemill.net/content/webpages/lemill-faq
• http://lemill.net/content/presentations/learning-resources-and-copyright
• http://lemill.net/content/exercises/british-newspapers-listening-comprehension
• http://lemill.net/content/pilots/1-hobuse-mure-pilot
• http://lemill.net/content/pieces/barnacle-goose
• http://lemill.net/content/references/oer-commons

If you have made links to LeMill content, please find some time to update links in your blog or web page.

This release also introduced some new bugs, but we will do our best to fix them soon. After that we will continue working with LeMill 2.5. In this release we are planning to have a long awaited possibility to upload Powerpoint files as presentations (in the same way as it works in SlideShare) and two new templates (lesson plan and school project).

We wish you all the best for the new school year and hope that you will find LeMill useful in your teaching and learning.

We’ve set up a Launchpad project for LeMill and are using its translation service. This means that anyone can contribute translations to LeMill easily by just using their web browser. No more need to specific PO translators or cryptic text files.

So you are all welcome to improve the existing translations - if something seems a bit odd in the user interface, you can change it and we’ll include it in the next release. Also, you can start a new translation for any language you can speak and write, no need to ask for our permission. We’ll include any relatively complete translation into the next release.

We have a few good news today. After a little break we have released a new version again. With this release we have worked a lot with the back-end of LeMill. Now things should work faster as they did before.

The most important new feature is added to the exercise template. Now it is possible to see if your answers were correct immediately after submitting the exercise. In addition to web-based feedback you can also get e-mail with your results.

We have also improved the reviewer role. Reviewer is a user who has some additional rights. Reviewers ca convert resources from one section to another. For example if some non-method is published in the Methods section it can be safely converted to a web page in the Content section. Reviewers can also delete resources to clean up LeMill from test content. We are planning to give reviewer rights to some of our most active users. If you are interested to become a reviewer you can contact us through the feedback form.

This is the first release that is completed with our new funding. After the end of CALIBRATE project in March 2008 we were able to receive support from Tiger Leap Foundation in Estonia. With this funding we are planning to have four major releases this year.

The third good news is that we have a blog now. I copied old posts from our personal blogs and LeMill development group to this blog, so you have all the history and future here. Have a nice summer and keep following our blog!