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More Information about eLML

GITTA: The history behind eLML

Screenshot of a GITTA lesson Since eLML emerged from the GITTA project , let us begin with a short introduction about GITTA and its purpose:

"GITTA was funded by the SVC , a program initiated by the Swiss Confederation. In order to achieve a truly integrated Virtual Campus of relevant players in GIST education in Switzerland, the GITTA consortium, made up of 10 partners spread throughout the country, covers a wide variety of disciplines and specifically integrates contributions of partners from universities, federal institutes of technology, and universities of applied sciences within a multilingual distribution (German, French and Italian). " (Fisler 2006)

In comparison to other Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) projects, we spent a lot of time evaluating the technologies. When we started our project in 2001, we were not satisfied with the existing e-Learning software that was available in the market place. Most of them were expensive proprietary systems that let you put in some information (mostly as HTML code) but offered few possibilities to design your content or even export it to other platforms. These systems were not deemed sustainable by us. Since the goal of GITTA was to integrate e-Learning into the regular curriculum of the participating universities, we could not build our project on proprietary software.

After months of evaluation the solution for us was to use XML to store our content and open source software (Apache) to serve it. Based on a selected pedagogical concept we developed a DTD (later an XMLSchema) which described exactly what a GITTA lesson could or should contain and in which order. After nearly three years of using and improving our GITTA structure, we decided to make both the DTD (now an XMLSchema) and the corresponding XSL files to create both HTML and PDF public. EduTech, who's mandate is to provide technological support to SVC projects, supported us both financially and through valuable input. We started to create an XMLSchema with the corresponding XSL files from scratch using our GITTA DTD that had been used for the last three years and leaving out the drawbacks and bugs :-) The result was called eLML and is presented in detail on the structure page.