[LON-CAPA-users] Happy New Year from LON-CAPA!

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Dear Friends of LON-CAPA,

Thanks to all of you, it's been a good year for the project:

* our user community grew, see http://www.lon-capa.org/institutions.html

* we received the ComputerWorld 21st Century Achievement Award in 
Education and Academia

* we were able to roll out versions 1.0 and 1.1 of LON-CAPA

* we were reviewed by Edutools, along with other leading course 
management systems, http://www.edutools.info/

* MSU received a $490k NSF award for materials development in LON-CAPA, 
https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0243126

* the core development team grew, http://www.lon-capa.org/core.html

* several papers were accepted by conferences and journals, 
http://www.lon-capa.org/publications.html and 
http://www.lon-capa.org/presentations.html

* we had visitors from North Dakota State University, Florida State 
University, and the Hebrew University Jerusalem coming to MSU and 
contributing to the LON-CAPA code

* we internationalized LON-CAPA, and in addition to a German and 
Russian interface, volunteers from Japan, Turkey, and Brazil 
contributed language files

* we had more users at MSU than ever, see 
http://www.lon-capa.org/usage.html

* several textbook libraries got translated and coded in LON-CAPA format

* our servers moved into the main Computer Center at MSU, 
http://www.lon-capa.org/msusetup.html

* the LON-CAPA team mounted a centralized support site, 
http://help.lon-capa.org/

* LON-CAPA is now represented on Educause's NLII Next Generation Course 
Management System workgroups

All of this would not have been possible without the support from you, 
our collaborators and users. In the name of the LON-CAPA team, I would 
like to thank you for your contributions!

So, what is this new year going to bring?

We would like to work on expanding our research efforts regarding 
educational effectiveness, and are looking into a cross-institutional 
NSF ROLE proposal. We are investigating different hosting and support 
scenarios. We will also work on better integration with university 
administrative systems and portals, a more homogeneous user interface, 
more languages (Spanish, Farsi, and Arabic in the making), and are 
looking into more exam and quizzing options (including "packaged" 
bubble sheet and PDA solutions).

Happy New Year!

- Gerd.