A critical feature of the LON-CAPA interface is the idea that a user must select a role before doing anything further inside the educational system.

The operating system LON-CAPA runs on is the Linux operating system. LON-CAPA relies on an Intel-based architecture.

For full-time, classroom usage, an adequate LON-CAPA server should be/have:

• a multiprocessor machine,
• a CPU speed of 1 gigahertz,
• a gigabyte of memory,
• and at least 40 to 80 gigabytes of hard disk space.

A lesser machine can be used for toying around with LON-CAPA (LON-CAPA will run for a single user on most any machine).

LON-CAPA servers experience significant peaks of activity before a homework submission deadline. To support these critical peaks of activity, it is strongly advised that LON-CAPA machines fit the above recommendation.

If thousands of students start accessing the box as a web server... you may want to consider more options. The design of the LON-CAPA system is to naturally and transparently load-balance on multiple computer clusters. So, a simple solution for running an entire college campus is to just have an adequate plurality of LON-CAPA servers rather than a single, particularly monstrous server.

We like to think of high web server usage as "a good problem" though.. :)

No.

No.

No.

The Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach.

An eclectic variant is: Look! Our New Car Answers Pizza Appetites.

Or something.

This code was originally written by a group of staff and graduate assistants at Michigan State University. We are now receiving software contributions from several other universities. The original technical design behind the project was constructed by Gerd Kortemeyer.

The existing user sites are:

• 4 high schools in Michigan
• Westshore Community College and Truckee Meadows Community College
• Universities in Senegal, Hungary, Germany, Canada (Simon Frasier University) and Zimbabwe
• Florida State University
• George Washington University
• Michigan State University
• Ohio University
• SUNY Stony Brook
• Florida State University
• University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• University of Michigan
• University of South Carolina
• University of North Carolina, Greensboro

We have been able to run LON-CAPA on RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, Debian, and Mandrake.

You must use CVS over the network. Please click on the upgrade button at the top of this web page.

Software packages that are (usually) very easy to install. RPM stands for RedHat Packaging Manager software package.

No and hopefully never. That is not what we are about. We are about a freeware-community oriented approach where the software features are directly specified by the involved academic institutions and instructors.

Time & Money. You and/or somebody else needs the time to learn how to use the LON-CAPA system. You and/or somebody else needs the money to set up and maintain a working computer server(s) for your institution.

More importantly, if your institution wants a sound future and a increased ability to configure the LON-CAPA software, we recommend that you assume some responsibility for contributing code to the freeware project.

I would suggest two major differences:

1. In LON-CAPA, the user is the fundamental data object. Other educational software systems seem to focus on the virtual classroom as the fundamental data object.
2. I look at it like this. Many strictly profit-based enterprises aim to significantly please 80% of their users. LON-CAPA started out, in the beginning, aiming for a much higher percentage since the whole project was about doing what no one had done before.