In 2011, the University of Zurich initiated a massive refactoring project with the goal of redesigning the complete code base and switching to the Mercurial version control system.

With the start of the refactoring, repository access for contributors from the OLAT community was revoked, making further contributions impossible.

Since frentix was founded in 2006, the company has contributed major features to the OLAT code base and was responsible for a large part of the bug fixing.

For commercial customers, frentix provided OLATpro until the end of 2011, which contained features that were not a part of the public release.

[1] In 2020, OpenOlat integrated open source editors from OnlyOffice to allow members to collaboratively edit text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online.

The introduction of a responsive design paradigm based on Bootstrap makes OpenOLAT ready for mobile devices and small screen sizes.

Also, the learning resources were divided into separate areas for learners and authors, making them more intuitive and easier to use.

OpenOlat Release 14.0 brought changes to the file system, which allowed the integration of different document editors, as well as enhancements to the administration.

Release 16.0 brought the 3G Covid certificate, as well as several revisions, such as a display of test durations in the eAssessment section.

Since this release, new OAuth login providers are supported and Zoom has also been added to the list of video conferencing tools.

In the UX / Usability section, many updates were implemented, as well as accessibility improvements making the orientation more coherent.

A set of building blocks allow teachers to create courses using a variety of didactic methods while incorporating communication, collaboration and assessment.

Items are exported in groups from the question pool and made available as an OpenOlat test learning resource.

Items can be imported either as learning resources or external XML files, or created directly in the question pool.

Through the role based authorization system in OpenOLAT, coaches can assigned to courses, groups, or individual users.

Social tools like blogs, forums, wikis, podcasts, shared folders, mail, and chat enable communication and collaboration between OpenOLAT users.

So-called expert rules allow fine-grained control over which users have access to which learning resources.

CPs and tests created in OpenOLAT can be easily exported and imported into other LMS, that also support these standardized formats.

OpenOLAT is written in Java on top of the Servlet interfaces and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux environments, typically on a Tomcat installation.

Hibernate is used as a database abstraction layer, Spring is used for configuration, Maven is used to support the build process, and Mercurial is used as revision control system.

The user interface is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the built-in Ajax mechanism allows only those parts of the page that have changed to be refreshed.