Forum .LRN Q&A: dotTeach 1.0 released

Hi

I am happy to announce that the first release of dotTeach is ready to be used. we would like people to have a look and give us feedback.

The package has 3 purposes:
- Helping students find information about courses/degrees and visualize their relationship
- Automating teaching administration tasks
- Produce a knowledge repository of teaching strategies, this is done with integration with dotLRN.

The system does not require you use dotLearn as LMS. We understand that many universities already are very committed to one LMS or another, but very few have a system that help academics improve their teaching.

dotteach and documentation is available at http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/surath/
The tar ball contains three packages weg-course-info, weg-course-infor-portlet and dotlrn-weg-course-info

Some dotteach 1.0 features:
1.- Extensive course descriptions CMS with version control. Descriptors are organized in 9 categories: course outline, Pre-requisite Details, Grade Descriptors, Graduate Attributes, Teaching/Learning Approach, Workload Requirements, Assessment Methods, Course Schedule, Texts / References

2. dotteach portlet and integration with dotLRN. Administrators can create "teaching communities" so academics teaching a group of courses can interact together (i.e "first year" or "computer engineering")> You can also have a place for managing the numerous committees that academics normally work in.

3. If you are using dotLrn as LMS you have them integrated. If you don't you can set up the links of the courses to your webct/blackboard installation.

4. Concept map visualization. Although it is still a bit poor it helps students understand the relationship between courses in a degree

dotTeach 1.2 will be released early october and will include:
- the code now has a lot of dependencies for Univ. Sydney, they will be removed.
- sample data so you can test it without having to create many courses.
- Internationalization
- Better code (on recommendation of Bruno Mattarollo some code will be factored to tcl libraries),
- The data model will include some descriptors on the use of ICT within the course (for reporting purposes).

1.3 in December
- Better visualization of concept maps using graphviz
- Faculty/School level reporting of teaching strategies used by academics.
- better documentation
- integration with Interwoven/teamSite used at USyd

In the longer term (dotTeach 2.0) for which we are expecting to get a grant will include:
- Integration with workflow (so different institutions can customize their workflows)
- Integration with a ePortfolio management tool

Pls have try it out and give us your feedback and sugggestions for improvements.
I will soon be posting here a link to a demo site

cheers

rafael

Hi Rocael
dotTeach is dependent on the dotlrn data model. It does not require you use dotlrn as LMS.

I expect that in October you will be able to install it easily and play with it

cheers

Rafael

I also would like a link to the latest version.

Thanks,

Matt

Nick,

thanks for this report. Do you have any draft about Curriculum Central? I was looking dotTeach because now we have the needs to dotlrn support presentation of activities around class workflow rather than only applications funcionalities.

This approach to dispose activities around classes could enhance dotlrn to deal with knowledge management programs using pedagogical techniques to organize activities to practitioners such in communities of practice. Will Curriculum Central handle this kind of problems?

tranks

Orzenil,

Curriculum Central is not related to the current Curriculum package. I apologise for the naming of the package, and the confusion it may cause. I have already consulted a few people about the name of the package, and dotTeach was not an option.

Curriculum Central is more of a pre-course administration package. It will provide a workflow for managing course outlines, and the relationship a course has with other course offerings. The workflow will provide a better audit trail of changes to course outlines.

Take for example this scenario (which just happened this semester): the faculty's course offerings website was displaying incorrect information about what courses students needed to complete to graduate. One student enrolled in the wrong course, and when they completed the course and expected to receive a letter in the mail that they will be graduating, but didn't get one, then all hell broke loose. I don't know what happened next, as it was on a need to know basis, and I didn't need to know. :)

Anyway, the above scenario has turned these course outlines into "contracts" between the University and the Student. Due to the legal implications, a better approach to managing the process of defining, modifing, and presenting course outlines is required. That is the motivation for Curriculum Central.

dotTeach was a prototype for this concept, however it wasn't designed to be generic enough so that other institutions can use it. So my job is to re-design/reimplement the package to make it more generic, as well as to use workflow, CR and notifications.

Cheers,
Nick.

PS. Torben, this work is not related to the sc2ws idea I had back then. There wasn't much interest in the concept - except from Michael Fieldstein :) - as there was a big push away from service contracts to call backs.

Curriculum Central has been added to cvs.openacs.org as curriculum-central. It is up to version 0.21d. I have a few more datamodel extensions to add first before working more on the UI. You can install it through the openacs package repository if you want to try it out on a development server. It is still very basic, but getting there.