Campus Project, a federated project available on Joinup, is an open source tool that helps to solve interoperability problems in e-learning platforms. Its developers focus on integrating learning management systems (LMS) with e-learning tools and services. Campus's development community aims to create a generic middleware for the most popular LMSs and to provide a set of standard mechanisms and APIs that will enable external tools to work with the LMSs.
Campus Project started in September 2006 as an initiative of a group of Catalan universities and was officially supported by the Regional Government of Catalonia, Spain. Campus's initial development budget from 2006-2008 was three million Euros. Currently, the software is mostly used by Catalan universities. The developers say that there are other software projects based on the Campus Project, such as Free Software Academy and the Speak Apps project, both co-funded from the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme.
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya are the main institutions involved in the project. The development team also gets contributions from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). One of the reasons is that the initial Campus's approach was based on MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative. It provides specifications for interfaces among components of a learning management environment as well as open source examples of how these interfaces work.
Future plans for the project include the creation of an educational app store. The developers explain that they would like to create a single space where teachers and educational institutions could easily find tools and build their own e-learning environment in the cloud.
Campus Project is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Developers say they chose GPL because “it's the best way to share their ideas and to collaborate with other institutions.”
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