Burrokeet Project Description

What is Burrokeet?

The Burrokeet project is an Open Source implementation of a Learning Content Management System (LCMS). The use of a LCMS facilitates the creation, storage, reuse, management and delivery of Learning Objects which are usually made up of content (E.g. Lecture notes, presentations, essays and case studies) and examination materials. A typical LCMS provides a central object repository for these Learning Objects and the tools required to access that repository. The Burrokeet project provides a solution that manages all aspects of Learning Object development and use, from the creation of content through to the publication and distribution. The Burrokeet project consists of two major components:

Learning Content Management System

This system provides the tools necessary to create, store and reuse Learning Objects. For example, it will allow a user to create a lecture made up of slides in a presentation and notes for those slides. These materials may be original or they may be reused portions of other Learning Objects.

Content Delivery Tool

A publishing system to deliver the Packaged Learning Objects. The materials can be published in many different formats from the single source format, for example, as a website, as a PDF document for printing, as input to a speech synthesizer for the visually impaired or on a CD Rom for home consumption where no network connection is available.

The Burrokeet project is an example of the power of Open Source software development. It incorporates a large amount of code from other Open Source projects thereby enabling a highly advanced and complete system to be built in a very short time at very low cost.

What's in a name?

Burrokeet is the name of an old-time character in the Trinidad Carnival.  It represents the beast of burden freed to frolic in the fields. Learners/Teachers are often "beasts of burden": collecting and developing good learning resources is a chore. Burrokeet (the project) is creating an environment for creating Learning Objects. The goal is to free the educator from the burden of content creation so they can focus on content quality. By providing a set of tools for the creation and discovery of Learning Objects, Burrokeet aims to free the Learner and the Teacher to frolic in the fields of knowledge.

Learning Content Management System

The learning content management System consists of a Sharable Learning Object repository. This repository allows Learning Objects to be published and reused. It is this reuse that makes the system so powerful. Consider a learning object in the form of a presentation on a certain topic. Since this presentation is stored in the repository as a Sharable Learning Object this material can be incorporated into any course notes that need to cover that topic. Facilities are available to allow the Learning Object to be reused in its entirety or partially. That is, a highly detailed Learning Object may have its summary materials reused as introductory review materials in a more advanced but related course.

This reuse reduces the cost of developing course support materials considerably. Burrokeet is being used to develop a repository of Learning Objects in the field of Computer Science that will be made available free of charge (to non-profit organizations) and the project leaders are exploring partnerships that will make other content available. Furthermore, since the system is compliant to emerging standards for content repositories content created in Burrokeet will be usable in a wide range of applications and will, in turn, be able to utilize content developed in those applications.

Content Delivery Tool

The content delivery tool allows for the publication and delivery of the Learning Objects. The content Delivery tool of Burrokeet is able to accept input in many formats whilst producing standardized output in a range of suitable output formats. The use of multiple input formats allows content developers to utilize whatever tools and content they have available to them already, thereby reducing the initial learning curve when adopting Burrokeet (supported input formats include MS Office Documents, Open Office Documents, Docbook, (X)HTML and many others). This flexibility of the input formats means that users are not tied into any single document format for their content. This allows existing content in these formats to be brought into the system easily.

The production of multiple output formats from various input formats means that content produced with Burrokeet will look consistent regardless of the source format. This consistency of presentation makes the consumption of Learning Objects much easier for the learner, whilst the use of multiple input formats reduces the burden on the developer of content.

Furthermore, this provision of multiple output formats makes it possible to optimize the delivery format for each environment, For example, the same materials can be presented as slides for use in the lecture theater, but textual scripts for student revision notes with no additional editing required on the part of the content creator for. Similarly, the same source content can be provided in a graphics rich way if high bandwidth Internet connectivity is available whilst a text interface can be provided for low bandwidth environments. A further example would be the same source material being converted to input to a speech synthesizer to allow access for the visually impaired.

The Future of Burrokeet

The Burrokeet project team consists of a number of staff and postgraduate students at The University of the West Indies, including Margaret Bernard, Anil Ramnanan, and Rajendra Singh. The initial development work on Burrokeet was led by Ross Gardler, a UK based consultant who was formerly a member of staff at UWI. The initial work was funded through a grant from IBM.

Burrokeet has been used to deliver a course to students at St. George's University in Grenada. In Semester 1, the course was developed in Burrokeet and exported as a Content Package into ATutor Learning Management System and delivered in ATutor. The next semester, the course was modified in Burrokeet and published as a static website. We have experimented with importing (and exporting) SCORM compliant Content Packages into Burrokeet from several of the leading Learning Management Systems.

As Burrokeet nears completion of its first phase we are currently considering the direction for the second phase of development. The e-Learning Research Group in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine campus) have a number of projects looking into extending the e-Learning capabilities of Burrokeet, whilst other members of the project team are examining extending the repository features of the system to include a wider range of content, thus making the system suitable for use as an Enterprise Content Management System.

These explorations have led to the Burrokeet framework being used for many more applications outside of it's current scope. Currently Burrokeet is being used as a web publishing tool to generate the website of the St. Augustine Girls High School (http://saghs.edu.tt) and the Computers in Society Project in Trinidad and Tobago (http://www.cis.org.tt ).