Dokeos – Open Source Learning Group - By: Robert Baird

One of the most significant tools which are responsible for the proper functioning of the online educational courses includes Learning Management Systems. These leaning management systems comprise of a set of software tools which aid tremendously in facilitating the interaction between the tutors and the students which comprise the root basis of online education. The learning management systems provide an outline of the course structure and the details regarding the contents and duration of the course, gradation of the various assignments allotted and an assessment of their scores as well. In fact in case of professional corporate courses, it has been observed that learning management systems are even more efficient in functioning. One of the most popular and the largest organization dedicated to open source learning management systems is Dokeos. The most important product manufactured by Dokeos is SCORM which is an open source learning group used prevalently by a majority of educational institutions, corporate houses and even federal administrations. Dokeos is widely utilized in about 60 countries worldwide with a total of over one million users registered in its portal. The Dokeos code is composed in PHP and it also makes use of MySQL. SCORM import is supported and transfer of information is also possible within the system by the use of XML or CSV file formats. While at present Dokeos has made considerable efforts to comply with the CSS standards, some amount of JavaScript is also required for its functioning. Dokeos is more of an international forum which allows various individuals, academic institutions and commercial organizations to submit their views and since its main agenda is concentrating on the development of collaborative programming, development of Dokeos is dependent on various factors like usability theory and extreme programming.

Dokeos extensively supports the usage of multiple languages and a little more than thirty languages are supported by it. Ghent University boasts of possessing the largest Dokeos installation in its campus and has more than 28,000 users who participate actively in the open forums. Apart from the various educational institutions various commercial organizations and federal governments engage the usage of Dokeos to facilitate their functioning. The various Dokeos features which are extremely helpful in aiding online education include templates to aid production of specialized documents, chats, forums to encourage interaction, videoconferencing and surveys, LDAP authentication, assessments and gradebooks to record the results, converting the Power Point presentations to SCORM formats and usage of the SCORM learning paths extensively.

About the Author

I got an online degree in under a year, and you can too by checking out http://www.an-online-degree-by-distance-learning.com/

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