OpenACES: the open source solution to e-learning

Abstract

We describe the development of OpenACES, an enterprise level computer system for e-learning. OpenACES is an ongoing open source project to deliver a complete on-line training infrastructure that is scalable, robust, extendable and that contains a number of highly useful features. The software, now used to deliver all online courses at the Sloan School of Management (MIT), is widely used in other commercial and academic environments. In the first section of this report we comment on the aims for the software system and the problems it tries to solve. In the second part we discuss its teaching and learning functionalities as well as its technical requirements. Aims and outcomes of the OpenACES project. The Arsdigita Community System (ACS) is a platform for building web services, originally built by Prof. Phillip Greenspun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Due to the success of the toolkit, Prof. Greenspun released the code under a GPL open source license. In 1997 Greenspun and and others founded Arsdigita Corporation to sell services developing Internet solutions with the ACS toolkit. The original system used the Oracle database as