Hamburg (GER), February 2008 - The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the leading United Nations agency for information and communication technologies. Its membership includes 191 Member States and more than 700 Sector Members and Associates. As the demand for eLearning is growing, ITU has decided to engage Lerneffekt to implement a new eLearning infrastructure.
All institutions have very specific internal workflows and best practices, which result in a unique configuration of information systems. Although an eLearning platform tends to start as a sandbox, it later grows to challenge needed integrations and scalability of the full solution. This was exactly the case at ITU in Geneva. eLearning started as a small project based on WebCT LMS and has grown to provide more than eighty countries and telecommunications institutions worldwide.
As the number of courses delivered increased, the corresponding need for distributed automated information system was felt day by day. Distribution is not only architecturally but also geographically complicated: some regions, for example most African, Latin American, and Asian countries, have good local municipal networks but very poor international bandwidth. Automation means the design of workflows and the implementation of information systems with an eye toward decreasing routine human tasks such as password generation, reset actions, producing graduation certificates, etc. to a minimum.
Thus the goal was to develop a simple distributed system for the delivery of ITU courses worldwide. The platform implemented consists of several integrated components:
The integral solution was implemented using mostly open source technologies and was customized to fit all of the organization's training-delivery needs. The second step is planned to further multiply the wealth of digital value at ITU by introducing a learning object repository.
It is also typical that each institution has particular internal guidelines, tags, and classification attributes. Thus the implementation of a digital library means not only integrating the software with other information systems present at the institution but also customizing it to reflect current best practices and workflows in the repository.
