University of Cambridge Visit Website: http://www.cam.ac.uk

The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom is one of the oldest Universities in the world. It has a world-wide reputation for outstanding academic achievement and the high quality of research undertaken in a wide range of science and arts subjects. The University pioneers work in the understanding of disease, the creation of new materials, advances in telecommunications and research into the origins of the universe. It trains doctors, vets, architects, engineers and teachers. The University's achievements in the sciences can be measured by the sixty or more Nobel Prizes awarded to its members over the years.

Over the past 15 years, the University of Cambridge has been developing online resources to support teaching. More recently, the University has been involved several initiatives to develop standards such as IMS and OKI (Open Knowledge Initiative).

The University of Cambridge in the UK started in 2003 running a pilot programme to assess the feasibility of using dotLRN as their main e-learning and collaboration platform.

Although Cambridge is currently not using dotLRN to support teaching at the moment, it has deployed it to support research and other campus communities with good possibility for eventually become the basis of their course and content management. Today, dotLRN at Cambridge has 300 users and it is expected to grow quite rapidly.

In addition, Cambridge has acquired Coursework from Stanford, Stellar from MIT and it has few in-house solutions. In order to find a system that best suits their needs, Cambridge has deployed Blackboard Basic Edition and also experimented with JetSpeed (Open Source implementation of an Enterprise Information Portal) and followed the development of University of Michigan’s Comprehensive Collaborative Framework (CHEF).

Cambridge has several reasons to work with Open Source initiatives: primary, the ability to modify and extend the software to tailor it to their educational processes. John Norman, director of Cambridge’s Clinical and Biomedical Computing Unit (CBCU), emphasizes that “… a successful open source process actually results in more robust and useable software (although how to get a good process going is not trivial of given).”