Hi
Bruce, I am not sure if I understand your point. It is true that the system at this stage is mostly administrative. As an academic I do not want yet another system that I need to learn and use, I want something that reduces my workload. So reducing administrative workload is the driver for academics. After atracting them to use the tool we expect they will be able to focus more in learning design and start using the collabroation tools to share those design & teaching experiences with other academics.
You will see that the main contribution so far is a very extensive datamodel for what we call "outline" taht in the US would be the course "syllabus".
It includes many things like "learning aims" and "outcomes" assessment, schedulle, textbooks, generic attributes, type of learning activities,.... basically all things that academics should comunicate to students for them to understand what the course is about.
It also displays a "concept map" between courses, linking the prerequisite courses so students can use it as planning tool that helps them understand which classess they should take in particular degree and why.
Nima, dotTeach is built on the dotLRN datamodel so it is integrated, in fact it is now a portlet that a teacher can add to the personal portal and will link to all the course administration pages for courses he administers or teaches in. I expect the DM will need to be extended to inlcude other roles such as Librarian (who are responisble for having books available, and eventually might be involved in maanging learning objects) and Administrators who need astatistics about course enrolments, $ costs, etc. But it is important to note that it is "independent" meaning that you do not "need" to use .LRN as the default LMS. This is for us very important because the official LMS is webct and the university does not want to "confuse" academics on which system to use 😟.
The criteria is that on our installation there will be no information about students (i.e. grades, mames).
I'm about to get on the plane so I will not be able to reply to this thread for about 2 weeks, but I'm very keen in keeping this discussion alive, and get feedback on features that could/should be included.
Surath should will be able to provide more info.
cheers
Rafael
