LeMill blog

Last week we organized a LeMill design sprint. LeMill was launched more than 4 years ago and it needs some rethinking on the design and user experience. We have developed a lot of small new features but the overall design has not changed much. New features that were added gradually have also resulted some issues with the consistency of LeMill user interface.

You can see the results of the sprint in the next version of LeMill that will hopefully come out by the end of September. It will have a new wider page layout and redesigned main menu. We have also developed a much more user-friendly way for reordering text blocks, media pieces and questions on web pages and exercises.

A more detailed summary of the design sprint is posted at hanspoldoja.net.

Preparing for annual ITK-days, the largest education technology event in Finland, we had to finally push an update to LeMill. There are few interesting features and some inner changes that prepare the base for nice new things in near future.

List of changes:

• New PILOT-player: should be more robust than the previous one and includes a fullscreen mode to make it better suitable to show in class.
• Embedding PILOTs. Pilots can be embedded into your blog much like YouTube videos or LeMill’s collections. When viewing a PILOT resource, the embed code is on the left side. Copy it to your clipboard and paste into your blog. (The feature to notice that now this is embedded into another page and offer a link back to LeMill is not there yet.)
• New text editor. Our previous easy-to-use text editor was quite problematic to maintain or modify, and we shifted to use tinyMCE-editor. For those who use Wordpress it should be familiar already: I’ve found that it is easier to modify and because of its huge userbase, it should be easy to upgrade. I’ve tried to keep the functionality as much like it was before; the table editor needs still some work, as tinyMCE:s default has too many features (and buttons) and the current table button doesn’t do enough alone. (To remove table, now it is easiest to switch to source mode and remove everything between table-tag and /table.) As a new feature I added Undo- and Redo-buttons. There are lots and lots features available for that editors, but our policy has always been to try to keep them in minimum to not distract with superfluous adjusting.
• Rewrote adding Media Pieces to Webpages and other similar resources. The difference is now only cosmetic, but inside there has been a prelimenary work for easier resource editing with less visible loading and saving of pages.
• With large groups and long lists of friends, only the first five names are displayed and other are folded behind ‘Show more…’-link. Don’t worry, clicking it won’t cause a slow page load.
• Simplified steps to create content and REMOVED ability to create Presentations, School Projects and Print Resources. The reason for this is explained by Hans in previous post. The existing resources are still there and won’t go away. They may be converted to other resource types at some point.
• Added resource tags to bee visible in left side bar. We hope that this way they get more use, and when they get more use, resources will have more tags and finding resources becomes easier.
• What else? Small fixes here and there, faster section front pages — the problem where loading a content section’s front page seems to take forever is now permanently solved. Generally smaller page loads.

We are happy to announce that LeMill community has reached 10000 members today. Most of them are primary and secondary school teachers who are looking for a simple solution to create and share web-based learning resources. LeMill allows them to create various types of web-based learning resources (web pages, exercises, lesson plans, etc), descriptions of educational methods and tools.

LeMill has been online since May 2006. During this time teachers have created 7808 learning resources and descriptions of 3960 educational methods and 879 tools. All content that is created in LeMill is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. This makes LeMill one of the largest collections of open educational resources.

LeMill community has members from 61 countries. However, we still have not gained much attention in English speaking countries. The most active users of LeMill are in Georgia and Estonia. It is difficult to say exact number of members from each country because many people do not completely fill up their user profiles. If we look at the amount of resources in different languages, number of members and Google Analytics statistics, then we can estimate that about 70% of LeMill use comes from Georgia and 15% from Estonia. These two countries have been so active because the national ICT agencies (Deer Leap Foundation and Tiger Leap Foundation) have promoted LeMill among the teachers. There are smaller LeMill communities also in Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Finland.

LeMill was designed and developed as part of European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme project CALIBRATE. The continuation of development was supported by Tiger Leap Foundation. The dissemination of LeMill is supported by ESF AVO project. LeMill project is currently run by Media Lab at the Aalto University (Finland) together with Centre for Educational Technology at the Tallinn University (Estonia).

We would like to thank all teachers who have used LeMill and all institutions who have supported us so far.

Just a head’s up notice that our servers will go down for 5-15 minutes tonight, at 11:00 PM CET. Functionality of LeMill will not change, this is just to upgrade the infrastructure beneath LeMill.

Last week our storage for media pieces maxed out at ~32000 pieces, preventing uploading of new pieces. During this week we have reorganized storage to use directory schema that allows practically unlimited amount of pieces and all of the pieces are now copied to new storage and the storage is activated. Uploading pieces should be working.

This change could also lead to some kind of speed gains, as we don’t have to deal with one huge directory anymore.

Teachers in Georgia have especially been very productive with great photos and images and we hope to see the flow of great resources continuing after this unfortunate pause.

Our hosting service found the cause of late performance problems and LeMill.net should now be much more comfortable to use.

There still is an issue of us having too many great media pieces, and the directory where they are stored cannot hold them anymore. This requires us to reorganize the storage, which will take few hours some night when there isn’t much activity.

Hello, and apologies for late slowdowns in LeMill. We have been working really hard to fix them, but unfortunately my efforts have often been misguided: I have found some slow operation that seems to be the cause and found out how to speed this operation on our test server, and when we finally have the fixed version running in actual LeMill site, we have found that the service is still as slow as it was — the problem was elsewhere.

Now we have extremely professional people from LeMill’s hosting service looking at the issue, and as he has much more better view on how the data moves in our system, he can probably soon point where the problems are.

In mean time, I’ve found two possible causes or minor causes of slowdowns and fixed them.

Making the problem worse is that the slowdown is at its worst when restarting the service, so activating our fixes at daytime is often not worth the uncertain benefit.

I hope I can get some of the problems cleaned during tonight 15.12-16.12, 23:00 EET onwards.

We had to pull LeMill into read-only mode, as we fix some catalog issues. Service should resume in a few hours, our goal is 14:00 EST (GMT+2) today.

During last weeks there have been an insidous defect with print resources: you can create them, and they seem to be saved properly, but when trying to download a newly uploaded pdf, it will give an 8kb file that won’t open in pdf viewer.

Last week we became aware of this defect, and found that all of the new print resources were saved in temporary folders and not in their proper places. All of the print resources created before thursday, 19th were moved to right place and should work fine.  At sunday we finally found the cause: After any object is renamed or moved, there are certain scripts that need to be run, but these are run in such way that if there are errors, they are not visible in usual places and running of these scripts just stops, thus leaving some important cleaning operations undone. Now print resources should work fine. Also this was the real cause behind many problems we have had lately with broken catalog objects breaking some collections or member portfolios.

Now we still have to repair those print resources created between thursday evening and monday midday, and check the catalog once more for new broken resources. But in total things should be better now: there are no data lost, and recent slowdowns are also caused by time-consuming creation of error messages and extended looking for missing objects.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Some things went wrong with the last upgrade. We replaced the old WYSIWYG text editor with the new one that supports also Safari browser. You can see the new editor in Methods and Tools section. Unfortunately the editor is not working correctly in the web page and exercise templates (#1927). The second major defect is related to presentation template. People receive an error message after the presentation is uploaded (#1929).

It might take more time to fix these defects. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: both problems were fixed on 09.11