10 october 2006 – The Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule World program is pleased to announce the release of the dynamic Learning Content Management System, developed by the Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences of ETH Zurich.

The dLCMS is a CMS for web based learning materials that supports easy editing and user-friendly compilation of learning content, advanced scalability, and flexible use of materials in various didactic contexts.

This is the first public release of a system that has been under development since 2004 and is now in production at ETH Zurich. The release is a beta of dLCMS 1.6 (1.6.0b1).

What is the dLCMS?

The main goal of the dLCMS is the enhancement of learning content’s reusability through the separation of content and graphical presentation, the consequent use of small, modular learning objects that can easily be rearranged into new learning units, and the collaborative use of learning content by teachers and content designers via the Internet.

Complete learning units can be exported as packages compatible with IMS Content Packaging or conformant to SCORM. dLCMS packages have been successfully imported into the learning management systems Moodle, ILIAS, OLAT, and WebCT.

Features, architecture, and component model

• Learning objects are stored in an XML format in a centralized repository
• An online editor enables authors to create content focused on their subject matter without having to care about graphical design, data formats, or programming languages

• Learning objects are stored in an XML format in a centralized repository
• An online editor enables authors to create content focused on their subject matter without having to care about graphical design, data formats, or programming languages
• Graphical style and layout can be defined through the use of a flexible page templating system
• The dLCMS is an extension of the open source Silva CMS and uses the Five/Zope3 framework
• The dLCMS is open source with a BSD-style licence

The dLCMS functional architecture is separated into four primary components: authoring, repository, assembly and linking, and publishing and export. The dLCMS Content Model consists of three component types: assets, content elements, and learning units.

Why a dLCMS?

Because of the increasing complexity it has become difficult to develop web based courses direclty with HTML, JavaScript, etc. The aim of the dLCMS is to ease and coordinate this process. A learning content component model defines different levels of learning components, their properties and granularity, and how the components can be aggregated into larger learning units.

Where can I learn more?

For complete information including the dLCMS Roadmap, documentation, bug tracker, web-based translations, mailing list, and SVN repository, see the dLCMS site at http://www.dlcms.ethz.ch/

The dLCMS can be downloaded from http://www.dlcms.ethz.ch/download

Professional support, further development, and hosting of the dLCMS is available from Infrae, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands: http://infrae.com/

Credits

Thanks to:

• The ETH World program at ETH Zurich
• The Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences for continued support
• Launchpad for development resources: https://launchpad.net/products/dlcms
• The many professors, developers, affiliates, and students listed on the site

Contact

FMI contact Dr. Samuel Schluep: http://www.zoa.ethz.ch/people/staff/schluep