Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: dotTeach 1.0 released

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9: Re: dotTeach 1.0 released (response to 1)
Posted by Nick Carroll on
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.

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Posted by Haynes Horne on
Nick! Any updates on your work with Curriculum Central (dotTeach) since the last post here?
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Posted by Nick Carroll on
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.