Forum .LRN Q&A: Improving .LRN project

I have taken the liberty of starting a new thread and cut Rocael's post:

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 09 Jun 2006 01:35 PM
We can vote, but better if we actually do something.
Besides voting, is about doing, and resources investment on those things we plan to do (volunteering will not take us too far).

I would like to see what the members of .LRN community want to contribute or think that is a must to make this project successful.

Carl & company are working on the next release, what about future releases?
Who's gonna work on marketing material?
And what about making dotlrn.org open to users? (I can commit some work on this)
Who's looking at the many-many packages of .LRN?
And putting resources to interact with actual and possible users?
And what about Quality Assurance of .LRN suite? (i.e. automated testing)
Improvements for .LRN usability?

Anyone with priorities?

There are core task that will improve a lot .LRN as a whole project, and there might be neat new packages / functionalities that will sink among an unmaintained project, decide yourself in what you want to invest!

We (Minnesota State Colleges & University System) intend to incorporate Don Baccus's portal package (new portal or whatever it's called) into OpenACS.

We also plan to incorporate the portal mashup demonstrated by Solution Grove (http://www.solutiongrove.com/mashup/portal) into .LRN.

Don, the aim is to have the same portal package for OpenACS and .LRN. As you know we have this had a goal for a long time for both projects. I hope we can finally make this into a reality.

Not only will you have "input" I am hoping that you will guide the work.

Hi Roc,

Solution Grove is very interested in testing and we are willing to help. most of our focus in on Selenium testing. Hamilton has written quite a bit of documentation and we'll make sure its all up to date on openacs.org next week.

Hi Alfred,

How do you intend to incorporate the portal mashup demo? I have been having a look at it for our implementation and have managed to incorporate the shade effects into the portals to some degree, however this caused a strange error with custom portal administration. I was using a new theme I added through new-portal and the ajaxhelper api.

The effects look nice but I haven't been able to pass the neccessary variables to remember the portal state. (eg minimized of maximized)

Matthew

Rocael,

You said "Galileo & E-LANE can work on: Quality Assurance of .LRN suite. (i.e. automated testing).

Actually, E-LANE through the INT partner has already done many test cases (about 165 tclwebtests). Some stress / scalability tests will come as well.

Galileo also wants to have the whole system with test cases (api and web, whatever is best in each case), we can commit to work on this during July 06.

This should increase the quality of the applications in the technical sense, and make it easier for further releases. Anyone else working on testcases? Anyone willing to review / use the tests? "

Why did you choose to use tclwebtest? Selenium IDE is much easier to write tests, users can even record tests. Right now Tclwebtest is integrated more with the automatd testing package, that is for sure.

Can you give some advice how to go about writing tests with Tclwebtest and your experience with it?

Thanks for the comment Bernd,

Very accurate comment: Usability & Content, both combined, will make the difference.
I really agree with this: "organisation of content should be based on sound instructional methods"

Although, Usability should be planned and done from the very first moment, I really do not believe is something .LRN can improve later, at least in the last few years, many new applications, little usability improvements. Sometimes seems like a technical-feature-focused-tool.

I guess the portal-portlet-system concept is just plain wrong for the student-teacher-goals.

Caroline says:

"We have a real opportunity to be one of the first to market in the LMS world with AJAX.

For dotLRN to be able to take advantage of AJAX, decisions will have to be made. How is the process of writing down a clear, quick, open, and fair governance and decision making processes going?"

I fully agree that there is an opportunity here. What decisions need to be made? Can we pose them here publically in the forums? I will support whatever direction the community wants to take.

Nick says: "I don't think too many decisions have to be made. It is more of a resources issue. Hamilton seems to be the only developer in this community that is actively exploring AJAX in OpenACS apps. He has committed a useful ajax package that contains a few open source ajax libraries. Any package that wants to use ajax just needs to install the ajax package, and add a link in their template to point to the ajax library they want.

Where decisions need to be made is whether ad_form should be updated to use ajax, and RTE to use ajax for auto-saves. In which case, we'll need to consider linking the ajax package into the templates package."

If that's the case, then this is not a .LRN governance issue? Correct? The ad_form and RTE decision needs to follow OpenACS governance?

As for resources, it would be helpful to know precisely what resources are required to enact these decisions. We can then try to pony up resources individually or through mechanisms such as the .LRN Consortium.

I can only speak for myself. I believe incorporation of AJAX should be a priority. I support it and will try to persuade others to do the same.

Dave,

we choosed tclwebtest since was the default and at that time I haven't heard about selenium. Anyway, maybe we should think if it is better to maintain just one tool for webtests as the official, or is ok to have multiple...