elmsln

This is a review of everything that happened in ELMS Learning Network through 2014. In 2014, we picked up an additional member institution that has been using ELMSLN for online courses. Wisconsin Law School’s Center for Patient Partnerships has been avid supporters of ELMSLN even prior to adoption in the past year and are very happy with the flexibility and control that it gives them over learning environment development.

They were also instrumental in landing the Wisconsin Law School an innovation grant to pilot ELMSLN for the entire school. The bulk of planning and figuring out what exactly that meant happened in 2014 and the deployment and course development will really pick up in February 2015. We are going to be collaborating on getting ELMSLN integrated with their single sign-on system as well as flushing out notions of shared content resources and discussion forums. As a result of our relationship, they have also dedicated a junior developer to the project at least through the summer.

Deployment and hires have also picked up locally as we now have the following groups at Penn State working actively on their own ELMSLN instances:

* College of Arts & Architecture (A&A)

* Eberly College of Science (Eberly)

* The Rock Institute

* College of Agricultural Sciences (AG)

* College of Health and Human Development (HHD)

Prior to 2014, Arts and Architecture (where I work) was the only group on board. In addition to being on board, A&A hired two part time junior developers to help with development efforts. Eberly also has contributed large portions of a full time user experience lead to the project to improve usability of the platform across its many systems.

A&A is still the only production instance delivering courses to students but Rock Institute is actively developing courses to launch mid-spring. Eberly and AG are currently engaged in course migrations / clean up and HHD will be beginning the process in the Spring, as well as contributing part of a full time site builder’s time to the work.

Much of 2014 was spent working in automation, build quality, and accuracy of builds. This focus on automation and accuracy can start to be seen in increased adoption locally as well as a group in the UK joining the project actively in 2015. Vagrant is another technology we’ve adopted to increase the quality of our builds as we now have completely destructible environments to test and build new functionality.

We now employ two robots dedicated to improving quality and scalability of work without increasing demand on people. Travis CI is a quality assurance robot that ensures every code push for ELMSLN is working. This ensures that our Vagrant instance as well as anyone that were to get the project at that point in time will be able to successfully install it.

Our other robot, Jenkins CI, just started helping recently. Right now he helps maintain the accuracy and quality of builds and upgrades internal to Penn State. For example, nightly Jenkins runs a script against all deployments to ensure that the file system is in place accurately and being managed securely. Not that systems magically become insecure, but people with access to systems can make mistakes; Jenkins now ensures those mistakes would only be temporary.

Another thing that the team did is talk about ELMSLN. The following cities had presentations about ELMSLN, most by team members:

1. Austin, TX - Drupalcon

2. Atlanta, GA - Drupalcamp ATL

3. Boston, MA - Campus Tech

4. Columbus, OH - Drupalcamp Ohio

5. Madison, WI - Drupalcamp Wisconsin

6. Philadelphia, PA - Drupaldelphia

7. Pittsburgh, PA - Drupalcamp PA

8. Silicon Valley, CA - BadCamp

9. State College, PA - Web developers Conference

10. Washington, DC - Open Ed

Data also has the ability to overwhelm. I constructed a plugin / website to monitor just how much of an impact ELMSLN is having outside of “elms” outright. http://dd1.btopro.net/drupal_org_user_data/btopro

As of this writing, 64 projects contributed to drupal.org to improve drupal as a whole (and be used for ELMS) have been downloaded 775,050 times and are currently reporting 11,589.

Installations. That doesn’t include ELMSLN proper as it’s download information is on github.com and not connected to these numbers. That’s ~1,200 systems managed by developers who’s success hinges (in part) on parts of the ELMS ecosystem. This means that they’ll jump into contrib and expand and help build upon ELMSLN without even realizing it.

We also saw commits to ELMSLN contributed modules from Acquia, Blink Reaction, and Bryce Jordan Center employees. These are contributions that no other educational technology platform would be able to pick up and is a testament to the investment in abstraction of the platform to be built on top of Drupal over the years. It’s awesome and incredibly humbling to have field experts downloading and contributing back to your code and I’m so happy to be apart of the larger Drupal community / ecosystem.

It’s been a whirlwind kind of year with more big news hopefully to be made in early 2015. It is incredibly overwhelming for me both the successes and the new problems to tackle as a result. Every positive tweet, comment, kind word, email or other communication is not forgotten; they keep me going. They keep me knowing that we are making an impact and that we can achieve my ultimate goal for the project: make the world a better place through better educational experiences.

In the next 20 years 2+ billion people will “come online”. What kind of world will we provide them? One riddled with the educational infrastructure problems we have today? Or an even more open, more transparent world. Where people can setup their own learning ecosystems with a click of a button, cost nothing, and help them education their family and friends.

The Singularity is forcing us towards a hub-less society. One in which everyone is able to produce knowledge and that we can all learn from others. We need learning technology that is free and incredibly flexible to allow for the myriad of ways people learn and will want to structure information. No more silos. No more boxed solutions.

Happy Holidays / New Year. Let’s make 2015 even awesomer then 2014.