Re: [Fle3-users] Why is it good to use FLE?

[Teemu Leinonen]

Hello,

I am sorry that my Spanish is not (yet) good enough to be usable in this 
kind of email discussions. So, comments.

César Hernández Rosete wrote:
> But here in Mexico we have us a problem: The public institutions can only
> assist to the population's 10%.
>
> We have attempted with LMS, but without success, The Technologies of
> Information for support to the training are only used in 11% (with success).

I understand that the situation in Mexico is of course very different 
compared to Finland. In Finland we have only 5 million people in all 
(25% of the Mexico city?), everybody go to nine year public schools that 
are pretty well equipped.

My opinion is that in Finland, the most successful experiments of using 
information and communication technology in teaching and learning have 
been in the field of computer supported collaborative learning. In some 
levels of education we have tested some LMS tools, as well.

Why I think we do not need "traditional" LMS in Finland is the fact that 
the critical question is not to provide quality learning materials for 
schools, but rather to introduce new pedagogical models supported with 
new technology. LMS that are mostly course material publishing systems 
do not give any added value for Finnish schools who anyway have school 
books, CD-Roms, educational TV and libraries close by. I am also pretty 
sure that schools will not soon give up using books. The usability and 
accessibility of a book is still unbeatable for many, many years.

I guess that in some schools of Mexico there are a real lack of quality 
educational material, and you have thought that maybe with LMS you could 
provide "better" courses for these schools.

So, I agree that LMS may offer wider access to learning materials. But 
why you want to use LMS? Why not just Content Management System?

Also in many cases CD-Roms are much better delivery media for areas with 
not that good internet connections. Some materials online that could be 
easily printed locally to be paper books could also be a good idea. And 
you really shouldn't forgot the old good TV, that is nowadays pretty 
cheap, widespread and very impressive educational media (e.g. compare TV 
to web pages!).

> we need LMS+"modern learning techniques". Technical of learning like
> Collaborative Learning. That is to say as FLE.

If we now focus only to online learning (Internet, WWW) my opinion is 
that you need Content Management System (CMS) + Fle3 (for collaborative 
learning). In the CMS you can have all the course materials available 
everybody who is interested in to study them by themselves. For 
organized courses, that are supervised, taught and tutored by a teacher 
or tutor (if it more like a self organized study circle) you can use Fle3.

> I believe that LSM+FLE+"group Meetings in the classroom". This can improve
> the learning, the meetings could be more sporadic than the classes
> traditions and with this we would achieve: To improve the teaching and to
> take advantage of the educational spaces.
>
> What do yoy think of this?.

I agree with you. Instead of using any LMS I would use some Content 
Management System and add Fle3 in there. It is also good to have some 
classroom meeting once in a while. So. in your case there would be some 
self study tasks with the content available in the Content Management 
System and some collaborative learning both in a classroom and in Fle3. 
Right? For me this sounds a good plan.

> What does LMS recommend me? That this it is GNU.

Of the Content Management Systems you could have a look of Plone 
(http://www.plone.org). Plone runs in Zope (like Fle3). This makes it 
possible to integrate them. Some people have already done this. Plone is 
also Open Source.

> How does FLE behave with 100 users?  and with 3,000 users?

Probably the biggest installation of Fle3 is at the moment the one run 
by the City of Helsinki, Department of Education. I think there is about 
2500 users. It works OK. We do not have a lot of evidence of big 
installations but what we know about the underlying technology, the Zope 
application sever, it should be very robust and should scale pretty well 
to large number of users.

Best regards,

        - Teemu

____________________________
Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
Office: + 358 9 756 30 296
GSM: +358 50 351 6796
Media Lab, UIAH Helsinki
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi
Future Learning Environment 3
http://fle3.uiah.fi