| Product Name |
eFront 3.6 |
| Developer Name |
Epignosis LTD |
| URL |
http://www.efrontlearning.net
|
| Review Date |
May 08, 2010 |
| Forums |
eFront 3.6 Discussions |
| Reviewer |
Email Review Staff
|
| Communication Tools |
|---|
| Discussion Forum |
- Students can enable or disable posts to be sent to their email.
- Students can receive posts by email as daily digests of subject lines or whole posts.
- Students can subscribe to forum RSS feeds.
- A spell-checker is available for student and instructor responses.
Discuss |
| Discussion Management |
- Instructors can allow students to create discussion groups.
- Instructors can set up moderated discussions where all posts are screened.
- Instructors can view statistical summaries of discussions displaying participation which can be used to generate grades.
- Discussions can be shared across courses, departments, or any institutional unit.
Discuss |
| File Exchange |
- Students can submit assignments using drop boxes.
- Students can share the contents of their personal folders with other students.
- Administrators can define disk space limitations for each user.
Discuss |
| Internal Email |
- Students can use the built-in email functionality to email individuals or groups.
- Students can use a searchable address book.
- Instructors can email the entire class at once at a single address or alias.
- Students can elect to forward their mail to an external address.
Discuss |
| Online Journal/Notes |
- Students can attach notes to any page.
- Students can combine their notes with the course content to create a printable study guide.
Discuss |
| Real-time Chat |
- The chat tool supports unlimited simultaneous group discussions
- Students can create new rooms.
- Instructors may moderate chats and suspend students from the chat rooms.
- The system creates archive logs for all chat rooms.
Discuss |
| Whiteboard |
- The whiteboard supports image and PowerPoint uploading.
- The software supports graphing, polling, and instructor moderation.
- The software supports group web browsing.
- The software supports application desktop sharing.
- The software can archive a recording of whiteboard sessions for future viewing.
- The software supports two-way voice chat.
Discuss |
| Productivity Tools |
|---|
| Bookmarks |
- Students can create bookmarks in a private folder.
- Students can bookmark any content material in a course.
Discuss |
| Calendar/Progress Review |
- Instructors and students can post events in the online course calendar.
- Instructors can post announcements to a course announcement page.
- Students have a personal home page that lists all courses in which the student is enrolled, new email and all course and system-wide events from their personal calendar.
- Students can view their grades on completed assignments, total points possible, course grade, and compare their grades against the class performance.
Discuss |
| Searching Within Course |
- Students can search all course content.
- Students can search all discussion threads.
- Students can search chat or virtual classroom session recordings.
Discuss |
| Work Offline/Synchronize |
- Students can compile and download the content for an entire course into a format that can be printed or stored locally.
- Students can download course content and discussion group content with a PDA.
Discuss |
| Orientation/Help |
- The system includes online tutorials for students that help students learn how to use the system.
Discuss |
| Student Involvement Tools |
|---|
| Groupwork |
- Instructors can assign students to groups.
- The system can randomly create groups of a certain size or a set number of groups.
- Students can self-select groups.
- Each group can have its own discussion forum.
- Each group can have its own chat or whiteboard.
- Each group can be given group-specific assignments or activities.
- Groups may be private or instructors can monitor groups.
Discuss |
| Community Networking |
- Students from different courses can interact in system-wide chat rooms or discussion forums.
Discuss |
| Student Portfolios |
- Students can create a personal home page in each course.
- Students can use their personal home page to selectively display their course work.
Discuss |
| Administration Tools |
|---|
| Authentication |
- Administrators can allow guest access to all courses.
- The system can authenticate against an external LDAP server.
- The system can authenticate against IMAP, POP3 or secure NNTP.
- Administrators can set up fail-through authentication against a secondary source (e.g. the system's own database) in the event that the primary source (e.g. LDAP server ) fails.
- The system can support multiple organizational units and virtual hosts within a server configuration.
Discuss |
| Course Authorization |
- The system supports restricting access based on roles and roles can also be customizedby the service provider.
- Administrators can create an unlimited number of custom organizational units and roles with specific access privileges to course content and tools.
- Administrators can distribute the permissions and roles across multiple institutions or departments hosted in the server environment.
- Instructors or students may be assigned different roles in different courses.
Discuss |
| Registration Integration |
- Instructors can add students to their courses manually or allow students to self-register.
- Administrators can batch add students to the system using a delimited text file.
- Administrators can transfer student information bidirectionally between the system and an SIS using IMS Enterprise Specification v1.1 XML files via web services.
- The software supports data interchange with student information systems through an event-driven API.
- The software supports integration with SCT Banner, SCT Luminis, Datatel, PeopleSoft 8 or customized integration with other SIS or portal systems.
Discuss |
| Hosted Services |
- The product provider offers a hosted solution.
- Hosting and support services from Commercial Affiliates.
Discuss |
| Course Delivery Tools |
|---|
| Test Types |
- Multiple choice
- Multiple answer
- Matching
- Ordering
- Jumbled sentence
- Calculated
- Fill-in the blank
- Short answer
- Survey questions
- Essay
- Questions can contain other media elements (images, videos, audio)
- Custom question types can be defined.
Discuss |
| Automated Testing Management |
- The system can randomize the questions and answers.
- Instructors can create self-assessments.
- Instructors can set a time limit on a test.
- Instructors can permit multiple attempts.
- The students are allowed to review past attempts of a quiz.
- The system supports a MathML editor for the inclusion of mathematical formulas in both questions and answers.
- Instructors can specify whether correct results are shown as feedback
Discuss |
| Automated Testing Support |
- Instructors can create personal test banks.
- Instructors can create system wide test banks.
- Questions can be imported from external test banks that support QTI.
- The system provides test analysis data.
Discuss |
| Online Marking Tools |
- Instructors can choose to mark each student on all questions or to mark each question on all students.
- Instructors can choose to evaluate student responses anonymously.
Discuss |
| Online Gradebook |
- When an instructor adds an assignment to the course, the software automatically adds it to the gradebook.
- Instructors can add grades for offline assignments.
- Instructors can export the scores in the gradebook to an external spreadsheet.
Discuss |
| Course Management |
- Instructors can selectively release assignments, assessments, and announcements based on specific start and stop dates.
- Instructors can release materials based on a single criteria (date, grade, etc.) or instructors can use Boolean expressions to identify multiple selective release criteria.
- Instructors can set up specific course content that is released on a specific date and must be completed by students before they continue with the course.
- Instructors can link discussions to specific dates or course events.
- Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on group membership.
- Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on previous course activity.
- Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on student performance.
Discuss |
| Student Tracking |
- Instructors can track the frequency and duration of student access to individual course components.
- Instructors can get reports showing the time and date and frequency students as an aggregated group accessed course content.
- Instructors can get reports showing the number of times, time, date, frequency and IP address of each student who accessed course content, discussion forums, course assessments, and assignments.
- Instructors can review the navigation record of each student.
- Usage statistics can be aggregated across courses or across the institution.
Discuss |
| Content Development Tools |
|---|
| Accessibility Compliance |
- The product provider self-reports that the software complies with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act.
- The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 Level A guidelines.
- The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 AA guidelines.
- The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines.
Discuss |
| Content Sharing/Reuse |
- Instructors can share content with other instructors and students through a central learning objects repository.
- The repository can be system-wide or for individual organizational units.
- The repository supports IEEE LOM and metadata application profiles such as, Dublin Core, Cancore, and custom profiles.
- For any content in the repository, users can view reports displaying every course in the system that is currently using the selected item.
Discuss |
| Course Templates |
- The software provides support for template-based course creation.
- The system provides course design wizards that provide step-by-step guides that take faculty and course designers through the completion of common course tasks, such as setting up the course homepage, syllabus, organizer pages, content modules, discussion.
- The system allows administrators to use an existing course or a pre-defined template as a basis for a new course.
Discuss |
| Customized Look and Feel |
- The system provides default course look and feel templates.
- Instructors can change the navigation icons and color schemes for a course.
- Instructors can change the order and name of menu items for a course.
- Institutions can create their own look and feel templates across the entire system, including their own institutional logos, headers, and footers.
Discuss |
| Instructional Design Tools |
- Instructors can organize learning objects, course tools, and content into learning sequences that are reusable.
- Instructors can create linear learning sequences organized hierarchically by course, lesson, and topic.
- Instructors can reuse courses as templates for future lessons.
Discuss |
| Instructional Standards Compliance |
- IMS Content Packaging 1.1.4
- SCORM 1.2
- SCORM 1.3
Discuss |
| Hardware/Software |
|---|
| Client Browser Required |
Discuss |
| Database Requirements |
- The system supports Oracle.
- The system supports MS SQL Server.
- The system supports MySQL.
- The application requires only one database and can coexist with tables from other applications.
Discuss |
| UNIX Server |
- A Unix version is available.
Discuss |
| Windows Server |
- A Windows version is available.
Discuss |
| Company Details/Licensing |
|---|
| Company Profile |
Discuss |
| Costs / Licensing |
Discuss |
| Open Source |
- The software is distributed under one of the OSI-approved licenses.
Discuss |
| Optional Extras |
Discuss |
