Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

Founded in 1898, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WUW, short for German Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) is now one at the top 10% of Business schools in Europe. With almost 25,000 business students currently enrolled, WUW is also the biggest business school world wide.

In order to increase the service level in the introductory courses WUW is taking advantage of technology-enhanced learning. Starting with its initiative called LEARN@WU in Autumn 2001, WUW has resorted to blended learning, where e-learning is used to support the lecturer to deliver courses such as marketing, accounting, law, economics, information systems, business communication, etc. to a large number of students. In the last semester 4000 students were enrolled to each of the 18 beginners courses. Currently the system has been successfully deployed using OACS to more than 7,000 students in their first year of university. Although these courses are essentially for freshmen, it is expected to reach students of the second and third year in the near future, utilizing the dotLRN framework.

Gustaf Neumann, Project Leader of LEARN@WU, emphasizes they have chosen OACS due to its ability of customization, or as he calls it white box: the reason for open source was in the (white box) component framework that promised a high degree of customizing to our needs and more reliable hooks for extensions.

Currently LEARN@WU, has gained a large success across the University. More than 13.000 learning resources has been developed serving 10,000 registered learners. Their servers help students solving more than 8,000 exercises an hour, facing more than a million web server requests per day and up to 10 GB of traffic daily.

Viennas production systems are running OACS on Linux (Red Hat distribution) and open source RDBMS, Postgresql.