Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: live demo of dotTeach

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7: Re: live demo of dotTeach (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Hi Jon,

I got in but I couldn't do much. I didn't have permission on the outline links and the Resource links were all file not found.

Can you help?

Thanks
Caroline

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Posted by Jon Suen on
Hi Caroline,

The permissions system with dotTEACH is such that professors (currently)
have a more limited access in regards to administrational duties.
I've just set up two more accounts on the server, to illustrate the
functionalities of a Department admin and Site-wide admin respectively:

email: mailto:deptadmin@demo.co
password: demo

email: mailto:swadmin@demo.co
password: demo

(Currently both accounts are not registered as a Professor to any
subject, so no units will come up in the drop-down box on the portal page)
Essentially, site-wide administrators will be able to add new subjects,
streams these subjects are allocated to, add/remove memberss
(professors) to these units, as well as designate which department
administrators are allocated to which department.

Any problems feel free to let me know, thanks

Jon

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11: Questions about dotTEACH (response to 8)
Posted by Peter Monien on
Hi Jon,

finally I found time to read the high level description of dotTEACH and click thouth the demo system you kindly provided. I took a lot of screenhots and pasted them in a document in order to have everything in one doc.

First let me thank you for the great work you have done and the already delivered system. I am longing to have it installed by Malte and do a test szenario with it on our demo server and present it to some German universities!

A few question appeared when I clicked through the system as a user:

1.) Graduate Attributes - in the exmaple of Aeronautical Engineering I see five GAs. Is this number fixed or would it be possible to add more, lets say ten GAs?

2.) Curriculum Maps - unfortunately I don't find an exmaple for the Curriculum maps under "View Courses and GA Maps". How would they look like, I guess similar to " Graduate Attribute Maps" with the semesters listed and the coloured boxes for the UoS?

3.) View Assessment Schedules for Units - Why is this restricted to four UoS? A student normally has more courses than four.

4.) Step 3: Where can I select a UoS to get some information displayed in step 3?

5.) I guess step 4 basically links to a community in .LRN that has teachers and academic managers as members? Or is there something special with special new tools etc.?

6.) Step 5: I just don't get a reaction of the system, when I click on this link? What is supposed to do and how do I get the system to display the information to me?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Peter

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Posted by Jon Suen on
Hello Peter,

Thank you for the kind comments and interest in the project. I am just a developer on the project; Rafael and Surath had primarily been the ones heading the development long before I came on. Though it is good to know that there is some (possible) re-implementation in other universities & colleges abroad.

In response to your queries:
1) Are you referring to the Graduate Attribute Report (ga_list) ? If so, it is possible to have it query more (or different) GA's; I originally had it query every possible GA in the database, based on entries by subject coordinators - but found this to extend that particular drag-down box much too long (around 200+ rows!); though it depends on how such attributes will be implemented in other places.

2) Yes, you are correct - though Curriculum Maps should effectively still show up; try this location:
http://129.78.27.143:8006/weg-course-info/course_maps?stream=2476
(of course, as more subjects appear and degrees are populated then this will be more 'complete', too).
Pre-requisite subjects for chosen units of study will also be highlighted in different colours.

3) For the purposes of our implementation, a student normally participates (on average) in four subjects per semester (term). This can easily be implemented to five, or six, but it will also change the size of the resulting schedule display.

4) On the main dotTEACH page, Step 3. (and the single Step 5.) tasks are not currently implemented - they may eventually link to our own (other) university services, and thus may not be applied generically. Sorry about the confusion, I should remove these steps from the page sometime.

5) You're right, Step 4. links to the communities, sub-communities etc. that a user is a member of. We have primarily designed dotTEACH with the focus that the main base of users are not familiar with dotLRN, and thus provide a symbolic link to some of the services that dotLRN provides (such as community forums, messages, etc.).

6) What link do you click to that doesn't receive a response? Sorry, I don't think the link you pasted showed up . :)

Cheers,

Jon

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Posted by Peter Monien on
Hi Jon,

thanks a lot for the fast answer! We are talking to more than 20 universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and try to convince them to choose .LRN as their LMS.

And I will definitly bring dotTEACH to their attention. I think it's a great tool and really deserves to have a broad installation base!

Potentially dotLEARN might be a really good fit for European universities as they are right now in the process of switching to the international Bachelor and Master scheme. But contact to the universities has to proove how dotTEACH will be able to help them there.

Cheers
& many greatings to Rafael and Surath,

Peter

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14: dotTeach Links (response to 13)
Posted by Jon Suen on
Hello all,

A brief update on the dotTEACH package:

- Developer's documentation manual is now available here:
http://www.users.on.net/~jsuen/tif-project/developers_manual.pdf
or, a *.doc version:
http://www.users.on.net/~jsuen/tif-project/developers_manual.doc
(it is up-to-date for the current release of dotTEACH, 0.91a)

- User guides (to aid in navigating the application) are available at the demo site:
http://129.78.27.143:8006/dotlrn/help
(and mostly contain links to *.pdf versions of the guides)

- The package itself (source code) can be downloaded here:
http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/software/

Cheers,

Jon