The Curriculum module is completed. Our special thanks go to Carl and the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg for making this happen. Thanks also to Don and the TAB/Core Team for your great assistance. And thanks to all of you community members out there who've been taking an interest in the Curriculum development. It's been a pleasure working with you all.
Curriculum offers teachers a course design tool for setting up online course elements (URLs) in curriculums, and it offers students a navigation and tracking tool for participating in these curriculums. The project has involved:
- Making visited learning elements get checked in the navigation/progress bar - including making external URLs, displayed in frames, get checked via click-through.
- Designing simple but functional user interfaces on admin and index pages, using the Workflow module for managing the administrative/publishing process.
- Providing portlets and applets for .LRN.
- Establishing .LRN as well as OpenACS subsite awareness, accepting one Curriculum instance per subsite (or class).
- Enabling the handling of multiple curriculum sequences per instance/subsite.
- Writing documentation for this first version of Curriculum.
In addition to this work on Curriculum, we've facilitated relative linking of files (AKA virtual URLs) in the File Storage module, making it possible to set up a file structure in an FS folder exactly like the one on your local hard drive and retain the interlinking between the files. This has also involved some changes in the Content Repository, which now templates the text files in the File Storage. If you want to try this out on an existing checkout of HEAD, update (from HEAD) at least the CR and FS packages and make sure to upgrade the CR package first.
The Curriculum package will be officially released with OpenACS 5.0/.LRN 2.0, but until then you'll find it fully functional on HEAD. This code will be reflected in the Curriculum demo, which we'll keep running. As package owners, we'll continue to handle your reported bugs and requests, even though the project per se has come to a close, so please keep your feedback coming.
Again, thanks everybody! Hope you'll enjoy the new features.
