Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) did a post on his trip to Spain on his blog (http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/). He was invited to speak at the LaSalle University’s F1rst Congress on Information and Communication Technology Managers. The title of his talk was “Open Source Learning Management Systems: Much More Than Free Source Code”. There also were a lot of discussions going on about different kinds of VLE’s.

Over there, MyCamTools got mentioned :

Then I mentioned the outstanding work of Cambridge University on MyCamTools as a move towards a more user-centered Sakai. I suggested that this would not make Sakai “user-centered” in my strictest definition – but it was a move toward meeting the needs of the student in a way that was useful to them.

During a Sakai Spain User Group meeting, MyCamTools got mentioned again and was shown to the people over there. Apparently, the things we have done addresses a lot of the needs of the Spanish Universities :

We talked about some transition issues from existing LMS systems – it was mostly about user-comfort issues when going from WebCT to Sakai. This is such a common problem and I wish we were better organized for this. I asked to get a list of the needs. Interestingly, many of the needs were actually usability and portal design – I showed them my Cam tools and everyone’s faces brightened up. Ian Boston might find MyCamTools in production in Spain before it is in production in Cambridge

Having someone else to run this in production would be great. It would mean more testing, more user feedback and thus very user centered improvements …