We at Net Effect (Phils.) would like to join the project.
We provide IT services to high schools (I think the equivalent US term is k12 schools?) and non-government organizations. Our large software development department (composed of me & myself) would try to be of help in the technical team.
Don, Al, I understand that the project is still under wraps because of the tight deadlines, but I would like to clarify some things about the direction of dotLRN.
Our clients are mostly high schools, and on the top of their priorities are (1) how to manage their teachers, and (2) how to help their teachers manage their students, and they put more importance (and more money) on these than on helping their students collaborate with each other, or on helping their teachers collaborate with each other. As a result, they contract us to work on systems like grading systems, online exam management, lesson plan management, classroom management (room assignments, seat plan, etc.) library management systems, and other systems that have more to do with management than with community and collaboration. You may find this outlook of our clients draconian, and we would really like to change that, but changes like these could take years, and we need cash now. :)
Considering the outlook of our clients, the nature of OpenACS which is a collaboration system, and my hunch that dotLRN will be primarily a system for collaborative learning, and only secondly for school management, we (Net Effect) have decided to focus work on the "management" modules and rely on dotLRN for the collaborative learning part.
1. Can we request a list of the modules that will, and will not be included in dotLRN? This way I can avoid doing duplicate work that will eventually be discarded when I find out that dotLRN has a superior version of the same modules.
2. There are issues that are in common in systems that have anything to do with schools, students, teachers, and classes. Issues like - how do you specify who is enrolled in what class? how do you specify who teaches what class? what class occupies what room at what day-of-week/time-of-day? I've already done a primitive enrollment system that does this, but I'd prefer to work on systems/modules that build on top of dotLRN than to work on systems that build on top of my primitive enrollment system. How do I write a module that interfaces with dotLRN? This early, can you share the data model?
