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.

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.

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.

Our current focus is on improving and simplifying the core features of LeMill. The main idea of LeMill is about collaborative authoring of web-based learning resources. LeMill is part of a Web 2.0 ecosystem that is constantly evolving. Successful services are often focused on one certain feature in which they are the best.

We have been thinking on the existing feature set of LeMill and decided that in some areas we should not try to compete with specialized web sites. YouTube is better in movies and SlideShare in presentations. All this content that is created and shared in other Web 2.0 sites can be easily embedded to LeMill resources.

We are planning to remove the following content types:

Presentations. Our first implementation of presentations required quite a lot of manual work because each slide had to be uploaded separately. Last autumn we changed the presentation template so that presentations could be embedded directly from SlideShare. However, presentations are not as other LeMill learning resources, because they cannot be collaboratively edited. Therefore we should think about presentations as any other rich media content that can be embedded to web pages and exercises.

School projects. In autumn 2008 we added two new templates - lesson plans and school projects. While teachers have created quite a lot of lesson plans we have got only 19 school projects during that time. When we were looking at these projects we realized that as a feature they are overlapping with collections. The idea of collections is to combine content, methods and tools that are used in a learning activity. Typically these collections cover a longer period than just one lesson (for which we have a lesson plan template). The aims, activities and outcomes of the school projects can be described in the teaching and learning story.

Print resources. Our idea behind print resources was to provide a simple way to share learning resources that are designed for print (exercies that are used outdoors, etc). However, many of the print resources are documents that could be more useful as web pages. If our focus is on the collaborative authoring we should guide people to share their resources as web pages that other teachers can edit. If you still want to share documents you can use services such as Scribd. As a benefit you can embed the document in a LeMill web page or exercise.

Source files for media pieces. This feature is used very little and one choice less would make LeMill easier to use.

All the content that is currently in LeMill will remain here. Presentations will be converted to web pages. School projects will be converted to collections. Print documents will be converted to references and can be downloaded in their current format.

As a result it will be much less confusing to choose between new content types. Our aim is to make LeMill so simple that new members can start creating content without having any training or reading any manual. Think about the content you create, not about LeMill.

We are interested about your comments and feedback before we implement these changes.

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.

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.

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.

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.