OpalTree’s CADRiA

http://www.opaltree.com/

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…

The system itself is built on top of ZOPE, which is encouraging if not in-and-of-itself groundbreaking. But it’s the proprietary portion of the product, the portion that OpalTree themselves have built, that does seem groundbreaking – in contrast to most existing repository systems, that rely heavily on human cataloguers and seemingly inflexible taxonomies, this system seems to be built on more ’emergent’ principles, and presents information to users based on their specific contexts and the contexts in which the resource has previously been used. In their own words, CADRiA “learns from the context in which information is used, predicts the information that will be needed to fulfil a purpose, dynamically builds semantic models of information that humans can navigate, and automates the assembly of knowledge objects that fulfil the information requirements of end users.” While it sounds fanciful, the demo I saw led me to believe that these folks are actually achieving some of the promise of XML, web services, the semantic web, learning objects … not by brute force but by pairing them up with some slick natural language processing and data mining techniques, like I think we all thought was supposed to happen, eventually. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I actually saw that day, and I will be doing more investigation of these folks in the context of our own LOR project, but I hadn’t seen them mentioned before and they struck me as worthy of a look. – SWL