The newly formed .LRN (read dotLRN) Consortium has released it's first press release.

Members of a multi-university project on open source software for collaborative education today announced formation of the .LRN ("Dot-Learn") Consortium to accelerate and expand development of an open source application suite currently used by a quarter million students and educators at institutions of higher education and research around the globe.

The .LRN Project encompasses an ongoing 10-year development effort and represents the world's largest open source project for scalable educational software. Built on the OpenACS project, .LRN applications originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and enhancements from the past several years have been deployed by the MIT Sloan School of Management as SloanSpace -- its primary means of providing class management and community support. At present, SloanSpace hosts more than 10,000 student and faculty users, amounting to 1,250+ unique logins per day.

Along with the MIT Sloan School, charter members of the .LRN Consortium include Heidelberg University, The European Union-funded E-Lane Project and the University of Sydney.

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Thank's to Rafael Calvo (Web Engineering Group, The University of Sydney), pumptheory.com's Mark Aufflick recently presented a series of Software Engineering lectures.

The slide sets and related research materials are now available online:

• Workflows - An overview of workflows including Petri Nets and Finite State Machines
• OpenACS Workflow - An overview of implementing a finite state machine workflow with the OpenACS workflow package
• Introduction to OpenACS Package Development

(All lecture material)