RL033 Jari Järvelä, Janne Hietala on Valamis

Radio Liferay

About a month ago I had the opportunity to talk to Jari Järvelä and Janne Hietala from Arcusys. They both head Valamis, an E-Learning solution on Liferay that later (end-of-August) won the Liferay App Contest. Unfortunately, a lot of work as well as my summer vacation kept me from releasing this podcast earlier (well, for me it was not quite unfortunate that I had a vacation)

Here are our topics:

• the history of name changes, starting with "JSCORM"
• The meaning and origin of the name
• The release schedule (they met the schedule that we discussed during the recording, released end-of-August)
• Features that have been added throughout the history of the project.
• The version released in August now has a Curriculum Portlet that combines different courses into a Learning Path.
• SCORM, the prevalent standard for exchanging E-Learning information. This standard is typically used as distribution format for commercial courses and Valamis supports SCORM 1.2.
• We talked about Liferay Certification being available "soon" - that was true at the time when we recorded the podcast, it's actually available now
• License, Availability and Price (hint: LGPL, and there's professional support available)
• There's a steady team working full-time on Valamis.
• Design aspects: The Arcusys Team really cares about design aspects, both in the software, as well as in their presentations.
• Geography for beginners, we talk about finish climate, ice-fishing, and "where is Finland"
• If you want to try Valamis without installing it yourself, just try it on their homepage: A demo environment is available
• Picking up my favourite code demo, sevencogs, from my last-year's symposium presentation "Well Hidden Features"
• The experience of publishing on Marketplace, PACL and PACL differences between application servers
• Future Features and Release Plans (e.g. Tin Can API)
• How to evolve from a Learning Management System to a Learning Portal
• The principle of Aiming High
• There's no shortage of standards to implement
• The team is working with a school in Afghanistan to provide what might be the first e-learning system in an afghan school, also connecting them to finnish schools and students.
• Upcoming Symposiums, Portal Solutions Forum, DevCon
• Since we recorded, Valamis won the Liferay Marketplace App Contest