Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Assessment - urgent

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26: Re: Assessment - urgent (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 01/30/06 06:40 PM
Jopez: Thanks. This is nice. You can even associate an assessment to a course.

I found some bugs though:
- Currently you can select from any assessment defined on the system
- Once you assign an assessment it is assumed under /assessment/assessment?assessment_id=foo so I guess we need to resolve the URL depending on the Id passed
- The assessment link is labeled as "enroll" but assessment could be really several things: an enrollment form, a test, an evaluation at the end...

Therefore I would recommend to allow a course to be associated with several assessments and let the professor decided what it means. And going that way why not allow a professor to associate any acs object to a course? If someone uses ETP or XoWiki in a course you could provide a link to the website and likewise to a forum, to the profesors homepage, to a blog ....

What do you think?

Who is actually the developer of dotlrn-catalog? I like it very much.

Greetings,
Nima

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27: Re: Re: Assessment - urgent (response to 26)
Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 02/01/06 02:42 AM
Nima, dotlrn-catalog was developed by Viaro, though now is currently unmaintained. There is a lot of documentation for actions and the dotlrn-catalog.
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28: Re: Re: Re: Assessment - urgent (response to 27)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 02/01/06 06:41 AM
Correction. It is maintained (although in a slightly different form).

We have been quietly using (and improving) it within Partners Healthcare for a pilot of .LRN (that will be expanded considerably in 2006 -- Partners has 30K+ employees). So far about 500 people have signed up for courses using the pilot. We have also integrated the system with our internal Active Directory using real time sync (we hope to improve integration of AD as well this quarter).

Take a look at the limited public UI here: http://hub.partners.org/catalog/

Here is a general project discription:
http://lcs.mgh.harvard.edu/projects/hub.html

I am happy to give you an admin account on our dev or staging machines Nima so you can try it out.

We are using a version that integrates ecommerece and uses the dotlrn course catalog API.

Eventually we hope to clean up the two packages (dotlrn-catalog and dotlrn-ecommerece), but at this point they are best taken together (e.g. I am pretty sure there is code in dotlrn-ecommerce that should probably be in dotlrn-catalog -- we put the two puppies together and ended up with a mixed breed).

It uses assessment for data collection (note: we are also dedicated to cleaning up assessment).

The original work on dotlrn-catalog was done for Heidelberg Medical School by Viaro, but it was not put into place so it could be fine tuned and tested before I started my fellowship at MGH (in addition Heidelberg was not yet in a position to actually use the code). Heidelberg Medical School will be using the same code starting in March and I will be working with them on improvments in February as well.

Also note, that the Museum of Science in Boston is using a variant of this code (for courses that imho are much more interesting than the statistics courses we have listed at MGH right now). See: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=324851

Eventually (contingent on further internal funding) we will use this as the main course interface (Hamilton just created a parameter that allows replacement of the standard course add/drop interface) and start migrating groups in /dotlrn to OpenACS subsites and the new portals in the first half of 2006 (what I hope will become .LRN 3.0 "codename Whiteboard" - Don gets credit for that one).

Carl

P.S. We are also adding anonymous evaluation using assessment. Work started on that yesterday.

P.P.S. Feedback is greatly appreciated, both are under active development.