Dokeos in Peru

In case it would be of any interest to you, I am currently developing a kind of “branch” of Dokeos (although nothing legally-binding about the branch stuff) in Latin America, and more specifically in Peru.

Peru is still what I would call a developing country, so at the same time it is hard to get used to (living there) and possibly excellent for future business opportunities. Of course, “developing” comes from “development”, and “development” means investments, which means a lot of money could be made (theoretically) from being in the right place at the right time.

Although I feel I’m still a bit ahead of “the right time”, I’ve invested a considerable amount of my time in developing the presence of Dokeos locally, and until now (about a year on) it’s not been very rewarding.

As I’m writing these lines, however, I just finished my first installation of Dokeos, or rather its videoconference module, on a Fedora 7 system. It ended up working nicely, but there wasn’t really any other expected outcome.

However, the interesting bit here is that it’s my first contract in Peru (most of my work so far has been a continuation of my work in Belgium) and it comes with a lot of simultaneous requests for information. I don’t know exactly why it’s all starting at the same time, but it is. So I might only have finished my first Peruvian job, but I’m still with 4 very serious leads for large-scale installations and training sessions, and a few more of unqualified leads, plus a bunch of people that know they can act as resellers of my (or should I say “our” as we’re a company of three now) services and take a nice commission.

So today, I might only being up to my first install, I am really positive about the future!

One of my serious leads is actually for software development, and is a request for a quote about the development of an add-on to the videoconference tool that will enable teachers to pass the video and voice to the user to ask a question. The feature has been requested a few times in the past, but we never managed to suggest a development time that satisfied the customers. However, now we have a much more reliable videoconferencing system (thanks to Arnaud Ligot and Frédéric Burlet), this might be much easier to work on (and so, cheaper). If you have an interest in this feature and would like to contribute to make it possible, just give me a shout. Otherwise, there is still a possibility that this client will not be able to finance the development and that we just leave it for another client, later on…

It always surprises me, though, how people are happy to pay 10u a year for a finished product, but reluctant to pay 2u for the development of the only missing feature in a product that costs 1u… (values provided for demonstration purposes, it doesn’t match anything).

Well, anyway, the point of this article was to let you know a little bit about my stuff, locally. The next articles will be a bunch of incredibly technical stuff, so this was just a big breath before the dive.

Video activity report for Dokeos

There’s some new stuff on the net in terms of code analysis. If you already knew about the CIA project and the Ohloh.net website, and you liked it, you might get a good interest in code_swarm, a java tool that uses SVN logs to generate a (good-looking) video of the project activity in terms of code development.

I played with it a little bit for you, and this is what it looks like…

The video itself doesn’t look too great once it has been processed by YouTube, but you can get a better quality one from here (about 7MB): http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-activity2.avi

Dokeos 1.8.5 released!

Dokeos 1.8.5 has been released, after a long 8 months development! Check it out on http://www.dokeos.com/download.php

There’s a lot to say, so I won’t comment about the release itself in this post. You can find out more about this release and what it brings you on the official website, by following the link on the right panel.

We are sorry to have kept you waiting for so long for a new version, but we’re sure you’ll understand why when using it!

Dokeos 1.8.5 released… kind of!

It’s still a bit premature because we’d like to try it out a few times more before officially announcing it on the website, so if you want to help, feel free to download your version from here: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.5.zip

In a few hours from now we will make the official announcement, so the official release date will be the 12th of June anyway.

If you happen to witness some wierd thing in the install or upgrade procedure, please, let me know as soon as possible!

Otherwise, just enjoy the ride. Dokeos 1.8.5 is concrete-stable, and this is a stability we will now be able to build on for the next version.

What’s left before 1.8.5 stable…

Not that I’ve been too busy on Dokeos lately (I tend to take my mind off Dokeos for a couple of days after a release), but it’s going to come back very fast now as we are warming up for the last run to Dokeos 1.8.5 stable.

So, what’s on the menu?

Well, apparently there are still *some* bugs about the course copy and SCORM export somehow. Thomas filed a bug for me about this. Although I did really worked my *** off right before RC1, it seems like something is still wrong, so I’ll have to get back to it.

Then apparently we missed a few options in the new “read-only” mode for documents, so I’m going to have a look at that too.

I also have to change a little bit the learning path default view, to reduce the header drastically. The rest will stay, but the header frame will be reduced to 1 pixel (if not removed completely - I can’t see why I couldn’t) and a new button “Back to course” will appear, sending the user… well, back to the course homepage. This comes as *many* (if not all) of our clients are complaining that:

1. when they develop custom styles, if the header is larger than the default styles, the frames structure of the learning path tool breaks it all
2. the header takes too much space, while all the user wants is to be able to see the contents of this learning path
3. it’s pretty ugly to have a framed design. Damnit, we’re in 2008!*

There might be some other minor things I should worry about, like getting a bit more of that multi-campus feature working**, even if it’s not going to be activated in 1.8.5 officially.

In the meantime, I might be up to my first sale here in Perú. I’ll give more info about that (if I can) later on.

As always, I’ll keep you updated as soon as 1.8.5 is out or close-to-being-out.

* I actually tried very hard to get rid of the framed design in Dokeos 1.8.5, but ended up fighting against the different types of contents we received from external sources. If there’s a CSS specialist amongst my readers (I really mean specialist), I want to talk to him!

** The multi-campus feature should allow one campus to be used with different URLs at the same time, with different (limited) configurations, including different stylesheets and sessions.
It’s not working yet but the database structure is ready to accomodate the feature.

Updated Dokeos 1.8.5 page

I’ve updated the Dokeos 1.8.5 page to reflect the fact that we now have a Release Candidate and are very close to the stable release.

This is a time for us (developers) to take a deep breath and analyse things with the satisfaction of someone having done a nice job. Nevertheless, we are very careful not to miss anything, but as usual we count on your help to spot things that really are difficult to see.

We are already thinking about the developments for 1.8.6, which will be only a few and will concentrate (if everything goes as expected) on exercises - making it easier and more reliable to build exams using Dokeos - and web services - making it easier to connect Dokeos to other web systems.

Dokeos 1.8.5 RC1, possible last changes and the close future

We officially released 1.8.5 RC1 tonight, although we might alter the package just for two little microscopic changes tomorrow morning (one concerning SCORM export on Dokeos installs that use a subdirectory of the web server document root, and the other implementing a default hiding of the audiorecorder for the learning path building tool).

I think there’s not much to say, other than it’s a *great* unstable release. I find it amazing how much we can progress with a good team. Not in terms of features (there are new features, and they are all interesting), not even in terms of bug fixing (there are tons of bugfixes, I can’t even remember all of them), but in terms of general stability and structure. From Dokeos 1.6, which was pretty much close to a “toy” software (I might be overdoing it a little bit here ;-)), we got into something… really amazing. We have now a full professional e-learning suite that lets you use pretty much any kind of
media, with an incredibly easy-to-use interface, all in a package that can handle without a problem up to 175000 users. It’s just freaky…

We still know how to improve it even more, but now we’re focusing on testing for 1.8.5 stable (which we will probably release within the two next weeks), so feel free to help us get faster there…

Into 1.8.5, we’ve shipped an incredible amount of security improvements, warning and notice messages (that would otherwise make the logs much larger than necessary) and fixed tons of bugs.

So now the question is “Why do others do more sales?”. Well, a huge part of this answer is: marketing. We have to do a huge effort in marketing in the next few months if we want to be able to continue the Dokeos development (which is very expensive, as is all kind of software that you don’t sell in itself and which doesn’t bring much free help). You can have the best product ever, if nobody knows it, it will be totally forgotten sooner than you think.

So if you have leads, if you think your company might benefit from Dokeos and… - why do I want to say “…if no one else can help, and if you can find them…” ? - … at the same time help a great open-source platform to develop… well, don’t hesitate to contact me! It will be my pleasure to follow the lead.

Preparing Dokeos 1.8.5 RC1

Next week, we will be releasing an RC1 for Dokeos 1.8.5. The main targets for this version are:

• fixing SCORM (import, export and reporting)
• fixing audio recorder and some videoconference minor bugs
• improving the templating system
• adding repetitive events to the agenda (and iCal import, as well)

I’m quite annoyed because I will have to update the database structure to allow for repetitive events, but we’re still before RC1 so it is still an “acceptable” change, and apparently it’s been said it would be in 1.8.5, so…

Dokeos 1.8.5 Beta 2 available

Alright, so I did release a little brother for Dokeos 1.8.5 Beta today. We needed it for a customer of ours which is in development phase, and we had made a series of small but useful improvements to the Beta 1, so we decided that “why not?” and that a little Beta 2 couldn’t be harmful.

It can be downloaded from here

Basically, improvements are:

• LDAP (tested in authenticated mode and added a field to define which value to search for in trying to recognize a teacher)
• forum post alerts by e-mail
• improved interface for creating new documents
• removal of *many* notice-level warnings
• speed and info improvements on users lists generation
• isolation of exercises (was causing problems when opening an exercise from a link)
• several fixes to buggy statistics for single DB mode
• fixed courses descriptions bug (couldn’t edit course descriptions)
• added informational messages in course copy to avoid user confusion

We are still working hard to try and get a definitive stable version out by the end of May or early June. We still intend to add several features to the whole thing (like *maybe* some kind of web services interface) which do not alter existing functions.

Can’t promise anything right now, but I’ll keep you informed.

Dokeos - Drupal link planning

I had an interesting talk with Marco Antonio Villegas Vega the morning of 19th April 2008 about a possible link between Drupal and Dokeos in the medium-term future (a few months).

The idea is that Dokeos lacks one thing that Moodle has (but that we don’t want in Dokeos itself): the possibility to build a widget-based website with your content.

Dokeos has a strong structure, which Moodle lacks of, making it simpler for new users to get around and learn. And learning is about the major thing users do in Dokeos, so if they can’t understand how the platform works, they’re in a bad position to start learning the real stuff.

So, Dokeos wants to remain like that, but at the same time a considerable amount of clients are asking us to better integrate Dokeos into their website or web portal. The idea is thus to start small, by first providing a Drupal module that will allow user to:

• log directly and automatically (if using openID at first) into Dokeos from their Drupal site
• get a list of events from their personal agenda in Dokeos (and possibly display it in the Events module in Drupal)
• get a list of direct links to courses they’re subscribed to (will open in a new window though, to let them continue using Drupal)
• get a list of certificates (more a Business Network feature)
• get a list of documents from inside the courses, to which they have access (will also open in a new window)

Dokeos would then become almost invisible for the most frequent interactions (open documents, check agenda and announcements), and would remain as a separate window/tab for the most thorough interactions.

This would most certainly imply starting to use web services as a largely-implemented feature. To do this, I’ve been thinking for quite a long time about integrating PECL’s package SCA_SDO which provides a nice way to re-use existing functions to provide web-services. This would hugely reduce implementation costs for Dokeos while providing the web services we need quickly and efficiently.

What do you think about it? Don’t hesitate to leave your comments, it’s still in discussion…