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| Product Name | LON-CAPA 1.2 |
|---|---|
| Developer Name | LITE Lab, College of Natural Science, Michigan State University |
| URL | LON-CAPA 1.0 |
| Review Date | October 15, 2004 |
| Forums | LON-CAPA 1.2 Discussions |
| Reviewer | Email Review Staff |
| Communication Tools | |
| Discussion Forums |
Discussions can be viewed by thread. Students can associate a discussion with any course content. Students can post anonymously. Only the instructor may delete posts. Posts can be either formatted text, or html. Posts can include attachments, an image or URL. The threaded discussion software includes a formatting text editor. Discuss |
| File Exchange |
Students can submit assignments using drop boxes. Discuss |
| Internal Email |
Students can use the internal email feature to email individuals. Students can forward message notifications to an external email account. Discuss |
| Online Journal/Notes |
Students can attach personal notes to any page Discuss |
| Real-time Chat |
There is a basic chat tool which supports anonymous posting. Discuss |
| Video Services | |
| Whiteboard | |
| Productivity Tools | |
| Bookmarks |
Students can bookmark any content material in a course, and categorize their bookmarks in a private folder. Discuss |
| Orientation/Help |
The system includes an online user manual. Students can access context sensitive help. The system includes an FAQ page. Discuss |
| Searching Within Course |
Students can search all documents. Discuss |
| Calendar/Progress Review |
Students can view all their assignments, deadlines, and due dates in an online course calendar. Instructors can post events and announcements in the online course calendar or course homepage. All students have a personal home page that lists new email, all courses in which the student is enrolled and all course and system-wide events. Students can view their completed and pending course activities. Students can view their grades on completed assignments or attempts. Discuss |
| Work Offline/Synchronize |
Students can compile course content into a format that can be printed and browsed offline. Students can download the content for an entire course to a version usable on a PDA. Discuss |
| Student Involvement Tools | |
| Groupwork | |
| Self-assessment |
Instructors can create self-assessments that students can take multiple times. The system automatically scores multiple choice, true/false, and multiple answer type questions, and can display instructor-created feedback, hints, explanations, and links to relevant course material. Instructors can create a database of questions that the system will randomize to create a unique self-assessment for each student. Instructors can embed program code into assignments to create unique variables and answers for every question. Discuss |
| Student Community Building | |
| Student Portfolios |
Students can create a personal home page. Personal home pages may include their photo, personal information, and links to important websites. Discuss |
| Administration Tools | |
| Authentication |
Administrators can protect access to individual courses with a username and password. The system can also authenticate against an external LDAP server or using the Kerberos protocol. Discuss |
| Course Authorization |
Instructors can assign different levels of access to their course based on the following pre-defined roles: instructors, students, teaching assistants, guests and staff. Instructors can customize specific access permissions for each student. Discuss |
| Registration Integration |
Administrators and instructors can batch add students to a course using a delimited text file. The software supports integration with student information systems through a tool that is based on scheduled system exports. Discuss |
| Hosted Services | |
| Course Delivery Tools | |
| Course Management |
Instructors can selectively release materials based on specific start and end dates. Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on specific start and end dates. Instructors can set up specific course content that students must complete before they continue with course. Discuss |
| Instructor Helpdesk |
Instructors can access an online help manual and context sensitive help. Discuss |
| Online Grading Tools |
Instructors can add the grades for offline assignments to the online gradebook. Instructors can view grades in the gradebook by assignment, by student, and for all students on all assignments. Instructors can create a comma-delimited version of the gradebook for export to an external spreadsheet program. Discuss |
| Student Tracking |
Instructors can get reports showing the number of times or all students in a course as an aggregated group accessed course content. Instructors can get a report that shows number of attempts and time per attempt on each assessment for individual students. Instructors can get a report that summarizes individual student performance on assignments. Instructors can maintain private notes about each student in a secure area. Discuss |
| Automated Testing and Scoring |
Instructors can create automatically scored true/false, multiple choice, multiple answer, ordering, fill-in-the-blank, image map (click on the correct part of the image), matching, short answer/essay, and calculated answer questions. Questions can contain images, video, other media files. Instructors can create answer-specific feedback messages. Instructors can import questions from existing test banks. Instructors can create personal, course specific, and system-wide test banks and use these test banks to create tests for students. The system can randomize the questions in a test and the alternatives for multiple choice questions as well as the numbers in numerical or symbolic questions. Instructors can also create survey questions. Instructors can set times for when students can access tests. Instructors can set a time limit on a test. Instructors can use IP addresses to restrict access to tests. The system provides test analysis data for individual test items. Instructors can override the automated scoring. Instructors can differentially weight tests and create grading rules. Discuss |
| Curriculum Design | |
| Accessibility Compliance |
To enable accessibility, the software implements the following features: content available without color, text-only content versions, the ability to suppress Java applets and to increase font size. Discuss |
| Course Templates |
Instructors can use templates to create course content, course units, syllabus and course descriptions. Course content may be uploaded through a form or chosen from a system-wide content library. Discuss |
| Curriculum Management | |
| Customized Look and Feel |
Institutions can create their own look and feel templates. Institutions can apply their own institutional images, headers and footers across all courses. Instructors can alter the appearance of their course. Discuss |
| Instructional Standards Compliance |
The software can import course content that is IMS compliant. The product provider will work with the institution to migrate existing courses into the system. Discuss |
| Instructional Design Tools |
Instructors can create both linear and nonlinear learning sequences using a content library. Learning sequences are reusable and become part of the content library. Discuss |
| Content Sharing/Reuse |
The system supports sharing content across course and institution boundaries. The system provides a central content repository where course content files can be stored and accessed by other instructors. Instructors can designate their files to be private or publicly accessible. Instructors can create links to content files in the central content repository so that changes made to the linked content are automatically displayed in their courses. The repository supports custom tagging standards. Discuss |
| Hardware/Software | |
| Client Browser Required |
The software works with most versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firebird, Camino, Galeon, and Mozilla. Javascript and cookies must be enabled. The software is not compatible with Opera, Konqueror, and Mosaic, except in a limited text-based interface mode. The same limited text-based interface is available on some PDAs, namely Opera on Sharp Zaurus and Thunderhawk on Windows CE. Discuss |
| Database Requirements |
The separate database software required for the system is MySQL. Discuss |
| Server Software |
The software requires that ports 5663, 8080 and 80 be available. The system can load-balance within server clusters. Discuss |
| UNIX Server |
The software was developed with RedHat/Fedora Linux and has also been shown to work on Debian and Mandrake Linux. The software should work with any Intel-based Fedora-compatible hardware. Suggested minimum hardware recommendations are: a multiprocessor machine, 1Ghz CPU, 2 GB RAM and at least 40 to 80 GB disk space. Discuss |
| Windows Server | |
| Pricing/Licensing | |
| Company Profile |
The software was developed by the Laboratory for Instructional Technology in Education at Michigan State University. Funding is provided by Michigan State University, the National Science Foundation, as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation. The software has origins in two earlier projects, CAPA (a Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach), that provided students with personalized problem sets, quizzes, and exams, and LectureOnline, a project to serve physics course material over the web. The project provides gateways to NSF's National Science Digital Library. Discuss |
| Costs |
The software is free and distributed under the GNU Public License. Discuss |
| Open Source |
The software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Discuss |
| Optional Extras |
The system provides support for multiple languages within one document. The interface is internationalized and provides partial localization for German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish. Students can submit feedback on any piece of course content. Instructors can generate randomized bubblesheet exams from any assessment content, which can be graded by the system. The systems rich text editor allows the creation of mathematical equations in LaTEX format. Discuss |
| Software Version |
The current software version number is 1.2 Discuss |
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