LEARN

Learn@WU is a government-funded project, which was launched in fall 2001 to ease the learning situation for freshmen at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.

The main objective of Learn@WU was to provide an electronic learning environment for students and faculty in order to support the University's mass courses. However, it was not the goal to introduce a new distance education program (and to attract even more students).

Learn@WU is based on the OpenACS open source community framework and uses the Postgres relational database system as its content repository. The main advantage of this choice was the possibility to employ MIT's course management and community-building system dotLRN, which is based on OpenACS. In the course of the Learn@WU project, dotLRN has been customized and additional packages have been added.

Today, Learn@WU is a heavily used learning portal (up to 339,000 requests per day) offering a high number of primarily interactive learning resources (e.g. electronic textbooks, self-assessment exercises, sample exams, glossaries), calendar tool, homework module, grade book, file storage, discussion forum, etc.

Learn@WU supports students and faculty by:

offering 24-hour access to learning materials;
facilitating course administration;
increasing the transparency of learning materials through standardization of content;
improving preparation for exams through self-assessment;
encouraging communication between students and between students and faculty.

For more information: website