LON-CAPA is a comprehensive and full-featured course management system with extraordinary capabilities for automated assessment and interactive learning, devised and controlled by individual instructor-users. It includes a large inter-institutional and cross-disciplinary repository of shared instructional and assessment resources. Authors, instructors, developers and publishers from around the world maintain their own published resources and can choose to make this content accessible to the wider community or to selected institutional domains, courses or individual users. Individual course instructors can simply include shared resources in their course as fully functional modules and have fine-grained control over many parameters affecting their application.
The project originates from Michigan State University (MSU) which has provided the principal development. The LON-CAPA Academic Consortium was formed in 2006 to ensure future funding and direction for the development of the software and to manage institutional memberships in the production network. The initial core members of the Consortium are MSU and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Simon Fraser University became the first Associate member in 2008.
At SFU, LON-CAPA was introduced in the Fall of 2001, superseding the predecessor assessment system, CAPA (Computer Assisted Personalized Approach), which had been in use since ~1995.
At SFU, there are ~10,000 student·course enrollments per year in LON-CAPA.
SFU Information Technology Services house and maintain the Faculty of Science servers and provide support for the implementation of LON-CAPA.