Dear Friends ,
It is a great pleasure to send you all greetings from the University of Kagoshima in Kagoshima City, Japan. We have recently embarked upon a world-wide comparative study involving 5 of the curently most popular open-source e-Learning platforms (MOODLE, ATUTOR, ILIAS, CLAROLINE and SAKAI), aiming to explore end-user experiences using these systems either as administrators, teachers or students.
As you may know, the use of e-learning platforms to support distance education has increased over the last years, particularly with the advent and proliferation of open source systems, with several evaluations of such systems hitherto being carried out and available online. Most of these evaluations are focused on technical performance, reflecting a number of criteria defined by specialists with a variety of intentions; however, it is our belief that a truly objective and comprehensive characterization of open-source learning environments requires the consideration of as diverse user perspectives as possible in order to provide guidelines that will promote significant improvements of design features in the future.
Our study has been conceived as an opportunity to document experiences of different types of final users that may have developed particular qualitative perceptions of the learning platforms they are using. We would greatly appreciate your participation in this study providing us with a brief account of your experiences using this system in any of the indicated roles. To that effect, different surveys been prepared and are available online on the following sites:
a) Survey for Administrators
http://canberra.ics.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/comp_study_LMS.php
b) Survey For Teachers/Instructors:
http://canberra.ics.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/comp_study_LMS3.php
c) Survey For Students:
http://canberra.ics.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/comp_study_LMS_5.php (in English)
http://canberra.ics.kagoshima-u.ac.jp/comp_study_LMS_5_japanese.php (in Japanese)
Once collected data have been processed, results from this study will be made available in this forum to interested teachers and/or administrators.
We thank you very much in advance for your kind contribution.
Sincerely,
Ramon Anibal Iriarte Casco
Dpt. of Information Systems Engineering
Faculty of Engineering - Kagoshima University
890-0056 Kagoshima-shi, Shimoarata 4 chome 50-20
JAPAN
Tel: 81-80-51521940