The OpenACS e-learning infrastructure & Case Studies

We describe the OpenACS web application framework and dotLRN, its Course Management System. dotLRN is an ongoing open source project to deliver a complete course and community management infrastructure that is scalable, robust, extendable and complies to open standards. The software, which is currently used to deliver online courses and collaboration tools at a number of major universities, is based on the OpenACS platform that implements an object oriented data model on a relational database. dotLRN includes functionalities for the school portal, student and class management, calendars, forums, file sharing, etc. In this paper we describe some of its features, its architecture and provide several case studies of institutions adopting it.