OLAT is a free, enterprise class learning management system (LMS) developed and maintained by the University of Zurich. It offers a personalized authoring and learning environment, groupware functions, powerful administrative course tools, and is compliant with e-Learning standards such as SCORM or IMS QTI. OLAT is available in 15 languages (another 17 are under translation) and comes with a comprehensive help system consisting of a user manual and a well elaborated context-sensitive help.
The University of Zurich released OLAT as an open source project so you can download and run it on your own server free of charge. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: The OLAT User Home page with portlets showing
the user’s next events, bookmarks, notifications, etc.
OLAT: a user-friendly, flexible, and powerful Learning Management System
Most contemporary Learning Management Systems offer:
- Collaboration tools such as chat, forums, or wikis,
- Some kind of assessment environment, and
- The ability to create or import learning content (e.g., SCORM modules).
However, these systems differ noticeably when it comes to usability and options for personalization, modularity, flexibility, and scalability, such as clustering support.
OLAT is primarily used in academic or educational environments. University members and students appreciate the intuitive handling, and that they can adapt their learning platform according to their needs. Every user can create his or her own group and invite other OLAT users for collaboration. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2:
The Wiki of the “OLAT Team” group. In the left navigation area, other group
tools (shared folder, chat, forum, calendar, etc.) are visible.
Further characteristics of OLAT are pedagogical freedom without limitations, CSS-Framework-based layout adaptable to your own corporate design, and simplicity of adaptation for professionals with Java skills. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3:
An OLAT course with the course navigation in the left column, general course
tools like notes, bookmarks, course chat or course calendar in the right column
and the main content in the middle column.
In contrast to Moodle, OLAT offers the possibility of setting up your own course structure and navigation. Visibility and access rules define which student can see which part of the course, depending on date, group membership, test results, or affiliation. Creating learning paths truly is a cutting-edge functionality of OLAT.
Developers and administrators prefer Java applications such as OLAT to PHP applications (again, for example, Moodle) when it comes to stability, scalability, and performance issues. An OLAT server can handle over 1,000 concurrent users. According to our experience, this typically is the capacity level for colleges and universities with up to 30,000 or 40,000 students. For higher performance requirements, OLAT supports clustering which makes OLAT one of the few fully-scalable open source learning management systems that can be deployed on multiple servers.
OLAT users around the globe
Since OLAT is released under the liberal Apache 2 open source license, universities and companies can download and use it for free, and without registering with the University of Zurich. This makes it difficult to know who is using OLAT, but there are still some clues. Figure 4 shows locations that have downloaded OLAT, and the OLAT Web site lists a selection of partners. In total, about 150 to 200 OLAT servers are up and running around the globe, mostly in Europe and Asia.
Figure 4: Users are accessing the OLAT Website from around the globe.
Another indicator of worldwide OLAT use is the number of translations. In addition to the 15 fully translated language versions, another 17 are currently under development. The University of Zurich is only in charge for the German, English, French, and Italian versions. The open source community and volunteers from all over the world have contributed all other translations, including Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Farsi, and Chinese. (See Figure 5; note that Figures 1 through 3 also illustrate English, German, and French versions.)
Figure 5: The OLAT interface is available in many different languages. This screenshot shows the Chinese version of OLAT.
Continuous development and knowledge exchange
The University of Zurich and its partners committed to continuing the development of OLAT and to releasing new versions every six months (the release cycle is based on European semester dates). The next OLAT release 6.3 will take place in March 2010. It will add new features such as being able to create your own blogs and Podcasts or to include external ones, a tool to distribute, collect and manage student projects, more extensive reporting features, and many behind-the-scenes improvements. Most OLAT developers are already working on the next OLAT release 6.4 (due in September 2010), focusing on eAssessment functionalities, support for the latest IMS QTI 2.1 standard, integration of the student information system (SIS), and compliance with the new IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) draft standard.
Meanwhile, the University of Zurich is in close contact with the international OLAT community. In 2008 and 2009, the first international OLAT conference and an OLAT user day took place. Another international OLAT conference is on schedule for early 2011. Its goal is to bring together OLAT users and developers, exchange ideas and best practices, and to stimulate further enhancements.
In 2010, OLAT will also participate in the Google Summer of Code program. Google provides outstanding computer science students an opportunity to work on projects in close cooperation with the OLAT core development team. (See Figure 6.)
Figure 6:
Example of a successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. A student participating
at GSoC in 2008 originally programmed the OLAT calendar’s import and export
capabilities.
Advantages of using open source software
Being part of an active and vibrant open source community is much more interesting than buying a commercial product off the shelf. Not only can you save the money of licensing costs and spend it wisely for adaptation, customization, or development of new features, you can also start to interact with the core community. This interaction makes the use of a tool a much more rewarding experience for you and your team. If you don’t want the hassle of being in charge of the technical background, you can hire companies that will install, maintain, or adapt open source tools (including OLAT) for you. On the OLAT Web site you will find a list of recommended commercial partners in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.
In my opinion, OLAT is a mature learning management system that can compete and — depending on the focus — even exceed comparable open source solutions and commercial products.
