The UNGweb project, described previously on ez.no, has financially benefited a Norwegian county enormously. Based on open standards and eZ Publish, UNGweb changed more & Romsdal's IT-based student service offerings to a purely web-based model.

Two years ago, the challenge was to achieve an IT infrastructure that could handle the large volume of laptops used in More & Romsdal's schools. Given the existing structure, it would have required several millions of dollars in added resources. Instead, the county decided to aim for a simpler structure, by moving all of the IT-based student service offerings to a clean Web platform, providing as many tools as possible over the Internet. The result is a structure providing a portal that each student can customize for their specific needs. This saves schools from having to maintain and invest in on-site servers, file and printer solutions, and distributed login and user management.

UNGweb also includes social tools, such as discussion forums, comments, surveys and user-generated content, which engage youth in discussing subjects that are often related to history, social studies, and ethics. Additionally, UNGweb offers video streaming and podcasts, all from the same portal.

I missed the announcement early last week, but Moodle 1.9 was made available in early March. Since I haven't mentioned anything about Moodle since last October, I have some making up to do with the open source project responsible for this course and learning management system.

Significant new features in this new version of Moodle include:

• An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems
• Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against.
• Performance improvements due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code.
• Tagging is now a core function allowing users to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags.

229 courses in 40 different places, five thousand teachers and more than 56 thousand students make the USP – Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University) in Brazil is the number one in Latin America and one of the 100 most important in the world. Since 1997 in the Internet, the university conduct a research on the last year with the visitors of USP Portal (www.usp.br) about changes and new features on this gate with intent to support the desires and requests of national and international users. The result was a set of new websites with a new navigation system, news and events channels, maps, informations to foreigners in four different languages and a new design."

Complete Story

Note: The off-topic but good discussion about Joomla! has been moved to its very own post: http://cmsreport.com/node/1664 . Please post there your opinions about Joomla! there. If you have comments specifically related to São Paulo University's implementation of Joomla!, those comments are still welcomed and appreciated here.

Recieved an e-mail a couple days ago from ATutor.ca that that there is a new version of ATutor available, version 1.6. ATutor is an open source learning content management system (LCMS or sometimes just LMS). As the project describest, with Atutor "educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment."

The two most significant changes with Atutor 1.6 include:

• Adoption of a single character set, UTF-8, which provides universal language support.
• A new look-and-feel changes and updates to the default themes

You can visit the ATutor 1.6 Demo to try out new features in 1.6 and download ATutor 1.6 to install a version of your own.

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

"...what's more important is that Moodle is every bit as good as any other CMS/LMS product on the market -- and better than many. Just being available, supported and free is not enough to be compelling; being all of those things and being better than the alternatives is."

Complete Story

Link found via Open Source Community

"A learning management system (LMS) is a big investment, and one not to be taken lightly. Mike Morrison has some advice on how to choose the one that is right for your organisation."

Complete Story

A new version of Moodle is released with the developers stating that Moodle 1.8 is "a very high standard" and is "highly recommend production sites using older versions to upgrade to Moodle 1.8".  Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The most significant new features in this version of Moodle include:

• Accessibility improvements (Complies with all major international standards in this area, including XHTML Strict 1.0).
• Moodle Network (Allows for cross-site roaming)
• Roles improvements

Additional changes and enhancements can be found in the Moodle 1.8 Release Notes.  Downloads of Moodle 1.8 can be found on the  Moodle Downloads page.