The future of OLEFA and technology in education

It's really hard to tell what the future of technology in education will be, although some developments seem to be rather predictable. I'd expect to see some radically new concepts within this decade (maybe as early as in the 2010-2012 timeframe), and I think some of these developments will be very exciting...

The future of OLEFA

EducDesign continues to maintain, develop and distribute the OLEFA software. The latest available version is OLEFA 11 (2011), which is more or less a slightly improved OLEFA 6/7.

The evolution of OLEFA seems to have considerably slowed down since 2008, and to me it now looks more or less like an almost dead project. Today OLEFA is missing all key features you'd expect from a modern web 2.0 platform, and OLEFA has definately been falling behind in terms of vision, teachnology and popularity within the past few years.

But OLEFA still remains the market leader in Luxembourg's education market and the number of schools using OLEFA has still been growing from 2008 to 2010 - although it's questionable if this will go on for a long time as the market in Luxembourg is quite saturated.

A new platform for the educational market?

I started the CorneliOS project in 2006. CorneliOS is a WebOS and and application framework, it's been a private project from the start and it's not related to OLEFA or EducDesign at all. Unlike OLEFA, CorneliOS is not targeted at the education market, and it probably won't be a replacement for OLEFA anytime soon.

In November 2009 I started work on some new ideas for the education market, work on these new concepts was completed after about a year. The core philosophy is now ready (as of November 2010) and parts of it will be implemented as free software (will be released under the GPL). Here are some details about this new project:

- unlike OLEFA it will NOT be a Content Management System for schools
- unlike OLEFA it will NOT be designed for the education market in Luxembourg
- unlike OLEFA it will NOT rival myschool!, Technolink or any other platform in Luxembourg
- unlike OLEFA it will be FREE and nobody will have to pay for it

So what will it be?

- it will be a set of solutions and ideas for the global education market
- it will be partly implemented as software, and all elements will be free software released under the GPL

What will it be about? Well, for now I'm focusing on the following aspects:

- content copyrights, licenses and all legal implications in educational environments
- learning process optimization (inspired by some business solutions)
- sharing documents and information
- the promotion of free software and free educational resources

When will it be ready? Well, we hope it will become usable in 2011, here's the current prototype:
- morzino.com is the international version of the project
- oli.lu is a customized version for Luxembourg

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