Interactive Learning Environment (ILE)

“…ILE is small but powerful environment for building interactive learning environments. It can be used to build any web application that needs interactive, persistent form-based features. But its main audience is teachers who think that hauling the education to where students work and live is better than the other way around. ILE is open source (free) software…”

This is a rainy Sunday project if ever I saw one – but definitely worth sticking into participo’s memory banks. It looks (disclaimer: I’ve spent 10 mins reading the high level pages) like it can deliver a pretty robust educational content management system (with login, grading, page -> lesson -> course -> curriculum structuring, the list goes on). It uses Ruby (a OOP scripting language that’s allegedly easy to use) and MySQL. And of course *all* this stuff is open source. It’s also on a 0.1 release, so things just improve and improve.

I’ve just had a quick plough through the demo – not pretty (but whole thing is managed by css, so no problems there). Pretty impressive – text capture, multiple choice, drop downs, course structure all there. Unfortunately the dynamic content pages are empty, but it must have a well documented API (wonder if it’s SCORM and/or AICC compliant?), and even if not, you could get something like flash to talk to MySQL directly.

While I’m not a massive fan of checkbox/multi-choice assessment (as it doesn’t exactly test contextual understanding), it’s no worse than anything else out there. And I do like the presumably automagical page -> lesson -> course structuring.