CopperCore v3.3 released - November 14th 2008

This version of CopperCore mainly focussed at improving performance and bug fixing.

More details about the changes can be found in the release notes.

What is CopperCore

When the Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) released the 2.2 version of CopperCore it was world’s first open source IMS Learning Design Engine that supported all three levels of IMS Learning Design (A, B and C).

Handling the Business Logic of Learning Design

IMS Learning Design is a complex, semantically rich specification, so it is not trivial to provide full support for it. IMS Learning Design specifies a template of a synchronized and personalized workflow through a course. In the runtime environment you must use this template to provide a user with an up-to-date view on his or her learning process. So for example when LD specifies a group assignment where all learners need to complete a specific activity before they can proceed to the next activity, the runtime environment should check this constraint and it should synchronize access to the second activity by continuously checking to see if all users did already complete their first activity. All this checking, synchronizing and personalizing is called the business logic of Learning Design, and this is exactly what CopperCore handles for the developer. By implementing this business logic CopperCore hides the developers from these complexities when incorporating the IMS Learning Design specification. Check for information on how to apply IMS-LD in education the UNFOLD project which is supporting Communities of Practice.
 

Technical details

CopperCore, a J2EE runtime engine for IMS Learning Design which can be used to incorporate IMS Learning Design in your own application's. The targeted audience are therefore system developers. CopperCore provides three API's and a Test Suite. Here are some characteristics:

• full support for IMS Learning Design including level A, B and C
• has three API's covering publication, administration and delivery of IMS Learning Design
• exposes J2EE, native Java and SOAP interfaces
• provides a validation library
• includes a command line interface to most of the API calls
• includes an example of a publication interface
• includes an example of a web delivery interface
• platform independent
• has built-in support for three relational databases (MS SQL Server/MSDE, PostgreSQL and HSQLDB)
• is ready for use with JBoss 3.2.x application server, but runs on other application servers as well
• licensed under the GNU GPL

Acknowledgement

CopperCore is one of the OUNL’s contributions to the Alfanet project. This project aims to develop new methods and services for active and adaptive learning and is funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme. In the SLeD project funded by the JISC e-Learning framework the OUNL and the Open University (UK) continued the Alfanet work and jointly developed the current full release. Furthermore there is collaboration with the RELOAD project in which an IMS-LD editor is developed. Check for details of the OUNL RTD-programma its Learning Networks website.