Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Some thoughts and question

thank you for your responses.

Bruce - sorry for my bad englisch but I had difficulties understanding your post. You are too poetic ;) Could you kindly sum it up in form of requirements or needs that you see?

Caroline, Roc & Ernie - I am happy to read about these developments. And yes Ernie - I think LORS is great. My comments were from the perspective of a power user.

Ernie - as you have noted correctly they do extract the stuff in a www folder. At present I don't see any benefits CR could give since I believe that learning objects have a very short lifespan in the sence that noone will care about old revisions of objects. What people care of are complete course revisions. So why not extract the stuff to a www folder first and let a scheduled proc upload the content to CR behind the scenes? Just a thought. Or maybe always upload to a www until the author agrees that the required maturity degree is achieved. Anyway, I don't have a good for that solution at present. All I know is that at the moment we end up with a lot of dead disk space and time consuming uploads at present which doesn't go well with an evolving course paradigma. And to be honest I think that is mostly because of the SCORM and LOM standard. The standards regard learning objects as static content that you simply deploy. They don't care much about evolution.

Caroline - I think lors should be a central repository of learning objects and the manifest file with it's organisations and items only a view to that repository (course structure). We shouldn't care too much about the way resources are organized to a single course since that information is too transient and each course user (prof) has a different demands regarding the course structure. So what we need is a more flexible way to redesign course structures. I am really interested to see what you all are developing on that field. But one solution could be: If you want to change a course structure (removing, adding, reorganising) you first download that course. LORS makes sure all objects have unique Ids which it can recognize later on. Even better would be if LORS would respect Ids that were passed from the package the first time the course was uploaded. This would allow authoring tools to reuse that course. Now you can rearrange your course let's say with reload. Finally when uploading the course LORS can figure out by the Ids which objects were deleted and added and wether the structure has changed or not and offer (and this is what I think is important) an new revision of that course structure. So each prof could reuse a course and rearrange it the way needed. Does this make sense?

Greetings,
Nima