Don,
Surprisingly enough the datamodels that we have don't overlap 😊 The reason for this is that Jack's datamodel deals mostly with the management of courses, students, managers, etc whereas the one I've been working on deals with the way course materials and learning objects get managed internally on the system.
I'll try to explain how this has happened as it might sound quite unbelievable for some of you 😉. [Jack please correct me if there's anything wrong in the following explanation as understood what I read on your code]
Jack's implementation was designed to deploy SCORM courses tracking the progress of students. OpenCore is meant to be implemented mostly at companies that want to deploy courses for their employees. So you first add your company, then your users, your managers, etc, and so on. Then to add an SCORM course, you first add the course to xyz/packages/opencore/www/data/course1 directory. Then the admin user goes to the course-import page (thru the UI) and the page scans for new courses added to the data directory. When found, it tells the admin to add the course. The course is added and assigned to students to be taken. The students go thru the course and the managers sees the reports based on the student's performance.
Now, the work I've been doing deals with the management of the course content and the standards that SCORM encompases rather than the delivery. So the work I've done (let's call it LORS for the sake of simplicity) let you upload SCORM/IMS compliant packages from a web interface straight into the content repository (and this might be one of the few things we overlap, but by the same token, it's not critical). Also, LORS handles the administration of the course resources and metadata: a course needs to be part of a .LRN class/community, search learning objects, browse/edit metadata, share learning objects across classes, .LRN export courses, etc.
As you very well said Don, I think LORS is more guts and OpenCore's UI... so I do see a lot of opportunities to work with Jack on a robust SCORM/LMS implementation that not only fulfils the needs of corporations, but also the academic world.
Although, as Don has pointed to Jack and myself (on another email) some adjustments to the implementation must be done to fully take advantage of OpenACS resources, there are other that have to do with functionality... fully compliance with SCORM runtime environment, search metadata capabilites, export content, etc... but we are getting there 😊
I must say as well, that it is great to have another person to work with... no more lonely coding!
Ernie
