--On 06 April 2001 20:23 +0200 Henny van der Linde <linde@inline-info.nl> wrote:

Hi,

We (a smal group) have build a quite comprehensive (but still far from perfect in our opinion) Zope based system in wich teachers can offer websupport with their courses. It's a sort of content management system for teachers. Students can also deliver content. There are groupware fascilites and more. This is all realized in a rather large social sciences faculty within a dutch university. We have a relative large, happy, userbase but.......

It has been quite a struggle. Not the development sec but 'selling' Zope as a platform and facing competitors in the ,so called weblearning world. Now we're facing a battle with Blackboard (I'm just recovering from an attack by some idiots who want to rebuild the whole thing with PHP, Dutch universities: never a dull moment.....).

Henny: I know the feeling. Blackboard, WebCT, etc come in nice boxes with manuals and are supeficially very attractive to many. But I, like you I guess, worry about these environments being a straitjacket in the not-so-long term.

What realy would help us (in defending our system and Zope) is a list universities, schools etc. who are using Zope for educational/scientific/content management purposes. I'm monitoring/contributing to (not as much as some of you I'm afraid) this list and I noticed that quite some activity on the Zope front is happening in academic/scientefic/educational environments but I never kept any taps.

I had a go making a list for UK HE back in February: http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/zope/gamut/sld017.htm Bristol can now be added to this list. In fact we're about to embark on a feasibility study which will include a comparative assessment of how easy (or otherwise) it is to integrate Blackboard vs. a Zope-built VMLE with our corporate information systems. The membership roster at http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/roster/zope will perhaps also give a feel about who in the UK HE is thinking about dipping a toe into the Zope water.

So if you are using Zope in this sort of environment please let me know. You can mail me direct: linde@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. If I have a list I put it on Zope.org so that other people can use to defend their (potential) Zope efforts to decisionmakers, a sort of academic/educational showcase.

I hope you also get a response from mainland European colleagues. I'm aware of a number of people doing interesting stuff in this area and regret not yet being a more active participant. Good luck. Paul -- The Library, Tyndall Avenue, Univ. of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1TJ, UK E-mail: paul.browning@bristol.ac.uk URL: http://www.bris.ac.uk/

On 6/4/01 7:23 pm, "Henny van der Linde" <linde@inline-info.nl> wrote:

Hi,

Hi Henny - one small comment, HTML mail is frowned on on this list :)

We (a smal group) have build a quite comprehensive (but still far from perfect in our opinion) Zope based system in wich teachers can offer websupport with their courses. It's a sort of content management system for teachers. Students can also deliver content. There are groupware fascilites and more. This is all realized in a rather large social sciences faculty within a dutch university. We have a relative large, happy, userbase but.......

It has been quite a struggle. Not the development sec but 'selling' Zope as a platform and facing competitors in the ,so called weblearning world. Now we're facing a battle with Blackboard (I'm just recovering from an attack by some idiots who want to rebuild the whole thing with PHP, Dutch universities: never a dull moment.....).

Tell me about it. As an institution, we have decided to use BB as our VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). The thing is this *does not work* for programs such as medicine that are not wholly modular based. Factor in additional learning requirements such as changing your curriculum and the fact that BB is a closed system and you rapidly end up saying 'no thanks'. If that's not enough - think about factoring in the training required for staff using BB (our Zope based systems are so flexible that we can add in bits that people ask for and simplify things to the extent that training isn't necessary). However, we are working with our BB implementation team to try and interface our systems with them :)

What realy would help us (in defending our system and Zope) is a list universities, schools etc. who are using Zope for educational/scientific/content management purposes. I'm monitoring/contributing to (not as much as some of you I'm afraid) this list and I noticed that quite some activity on the Zope front is happening in academic/scientefic/educational environments but I never kept any taps.

Some background: The FMCC is a unit funded by our medical faculty (which includes dentistry and biomed science) to backup the faculty with IT systems that the university doesn't fund, but which the faculty decides is essential. That is, our focus is faculty based, but we do have systems that are used by the university as a whole. We've used Zope since the 1.03 release. Initially it was just me using Zope, but we've now expanded to about a dozen people doing active development from graphic design through to python and perl scripts (no products yet though!). Examples of our Zope work that you can see; 1) http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/nle - Networked Learning Environment project. (I can't show you the best bit of this site, as the material is medically orientated). The interesting thing here is that we've been able to deploy our finished systems at other institutions with minimal hassle. 2) http://medical.faculty.ncl.ac.uk - our Medical Faculty site. We're going to be using part of this site to manage presentation of publications by our researchers 3) http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk - a Learning and Teaching Support Network group located at Newcastle. 4) http://www.ncl.ac.uk/dental - our Dentistry department The stuff you can't see includes 1) The guts of (1) above - A database driven VLE and curriculum management system for our medical students 2) A module outline site, which is being used to manage the production (and printing via automatic PDF generators) of administration documents on line (or registrars office likes this!). 3) Scientifically, our Biomedical Sciences and Genetics group use Zope Additionally, we're using the XML functionality in Zope to share some of our data with other universities. There's a lot of activity in Zope land at the moment, CMF looks very interesting, and the ZPT has enormous potential. Oh, and to those who flipped when DC announced Perl support for Zope - this has been very useful for us. We have a group of people here using Perl who wanted to keep their investment - so I set up a Zope-Perl installation on another box and let them loose. Thing is, at the same time, I provided server space on our main box and showed them how to re-implement their projects in Zope...suffice it to say that they've been rather impressed with the way things work. Classic quote from a Perl-user "this zope stuff isn't that hard to get your head around is it?", the response being a sheepish "weeeell, no actually".

So if you are using Zope in this sort of environment please let me know. You can mail me direct: linde@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. If I have a list I put it on Zope.org so that other people can use to defend their (potential) Zope efforts to decisionmakers, a sort of academic/educational showcase.

Henny van der Linde

I realise I've started to ramble, Henny - I hope this helps, I know that we could not have done anything like what we've managed to accomplish if we were using any other system I'm aware of. Tone -- Dr Tony McDonald, Assistant Director, FMCC, http://www.fmcc.org.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 243 6140 A Zope list for UK HE/FE http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope