business.newsforge.com — In the world of education, technology plays an ever-increasing role in student management and other administrative tasks. Teachers all over the world are using an open source GPL-licensed course management system called LON-CAPA, and the result are "revitalizing," "unique," and "creative," according to some of its users.
May 17, 2006 View in Crawl 4
aeontorporMay 18, 2006
@Megaton"When an ethic serves a self interest, the only interest served is the self."What the hell were you trying to get at? That's the exact opposite of what open source is doing. People help themselves, and in the process help whoever uses the modified code later on. And that's only 1 form of motivation.
omaksimovMay 18, 2006
Words still fail me
tdyerMay 18, 2006
at my university, Dal, the physics department had its own CAPA program. alway online, always worked. the endless recorrection thing chnaged to 20 tries when a CS/Physics double major created a program that would increment the answer by 0.00001 and keep going until the answer was finished.The questions were loathed because you couldnt really cheat that much, since none of your friends had the same exact questions, however it tought us formula derivation for cheating which was a good thing. the forums that accompanied the site, would have a few of the brightest students explaining formulas or creating excel spreadsheets for the dimmer students to use for their assignments.overall i liked it.
shelinedMay 18, 2006
This really isn't just course management. This was developed at Michigan State University, and they use it in most science classes. It allows the professor to write homework and exam questions, and then randomly generates a different problem for each student (different numbers, different concept (replaces words up with down) etc). This way it is more difficult to cheat on both exams and homework. Makes doing physics homework == Hell.Sample Problem<a class="user" href="http://demo.lon-capa.org/res/msu/kortemey/demo/public/AccelerationHist.problem">http://demo.lon-capa.org/res/msu/kortemey/demo/public/AccelerationHist.problem</a>
Closed AccountMay 18, 2006
Megaton wrote: "Truth is, open source is only as good as its managers."So very true. That's why we have N3P <a class="user" href="http://n3p.se/en.php">http://n3p.se/en.php</a>"N3P offers a brand new two-year college level training in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur in Open Source. Our students will learn not only the technical possibilities, but also how to exploit new business opportunities, manage profitable ideas, and create flourishing businesses."
megatonMay 18, 2006
Aha! Very cool! Thanks for the heads-up!
4ngerMay 18, 2006
> Makes doing physics homework == Hell.This sounds like one of my students :) Anyway - we have found that students learn more when they have instant feedback and multiple ties for each problem. Also, with percistance, they can always earn a high grade on homework. It works out well for the student in evey way - except that they actually have to work. As a physics professor, I really like LON-CAPA.I will add that it DOES have a full classroom management feature set, but not everyone uses it.Another huge advantage is that it has a very high quality shared problem library - every professor who uses the system can write problems and chose to make them avalable to any other professor who uses the system.
Closed AccountMay 18, 2006
We actually used this in a differential equations course or something like that about a year ago. I don't remember anything about it though, besides the name (without the hyphen).
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