Forum OpenACS Q&A: survey / simple-survey status for 4.6?

I've heard or read that for one Malte is working on an improvement of
survey or simple-survey while dotLRN has survey within its objective.
What is the current status? Shouldn't we deprecate on of the two?

What i mean by "grading" is the following. If you have a multiple choice survey with a number of questions - possibly broken down into a number of sub-survey categories - grading would allow you to:

• it would allow teachers to administer multiple choice quizzes/tests/practice tests via survey that are automatically graded!
• it would allow people to take personality tests/quizzes, where you analyze responses in categories, and derive something about a person from each of those categories based on the score - and then you could give a response to the person per category. I.e. you seem more angry than normal, you are a thinking person (instead of a sensing person), etc.
• Even if you don't give the analysis to the web user - you could generate useful reports for the site administrators, about the responses given by complex surveys (i.e. the average response for category 1 was 23.4, and category 2 was 32.7, etc.). I guess this would be sort of like the automatic generation of graphcs/pie charts.

If you're interested, you can see my package in action if you look at the Demos section at http://www.cvoutcomes.org/

We (Polyxena) felt the need for something (exactly) like this while we were evaluating the Curriculum module from 3.x. (BTW, we've started working on expanding Curriculum and are looking at making it a 4.x package.)

(The Curriculum module keeps track of work items or elements (urls) that are part of a course (a curriculum). It describes the involved elements, and, more importantly, acts as a progress meter by showing a progress bar at the bottom of each page. The elements in this visual curriculum bar get checked as the user visits the corresponding url.)

One piece of functionality the original Curriculum module lacks (among other) is the ability to control that the user has actually read and understood the document before moving on to another element in the curriculum. We immediately thought of the survey module as already being able to serve Curriculum with that functionality. Since it doesn't yet do that, we would be very interested in working with you on developing such graded surveys.

I think curriculum would define the operations and for a package to "work" with curriculum, it would have to provide an implementation of that operation for its objects.

I am probably not the best person to explain it.

Are you talking about the search service contract for new and forums? They should work pretty much the same. The only difference is that forums has to define the triggers to insert items into the search queue because it does not use the content repository. News uses the content repository and doesn't need the triggers.

All of you: I figure my lay-up of the problem implies that the Survey extensions we are discussing are of two quite distinct sorts:

• The Survey Stats functionality is an inductive operation within Survey, suggesting to me that in this respect Survey will be the client and the graph software the service provider.
• The Graded Survey functionality is a deductive operation within Survey, suggesting to me that in this respect Survey will be the service provider and Curriculum the client.

This is very interesting functionality indeed. If it's for real, it seems that it would be worth some time and energy (and dare I suggest money) to set up the tools for such SCORM compliance, in order to facilitate interoperability between online learning websites.

I didn't get the impression that SCORM is needed for the internal operations on the OpenACS system, though. I may have misunderstood SCORM, of course; is it in fact supposed to be a total, completely integrated, solution for the LMS? If not, the direct interoperability between Curriculum and Survey is a service contract thing after all, I suppose.

I makes me wonder, though: How far is this here Curriculum package, enforced with the graded survey functionality, from being an LMS?

If you think of curriculum as a work-flow/sequencing tool, in the old 3x Curriculum there was no branching, just one order to the links. The success criteria was viewing the url. Simple and useful. The Polyxena Curriculum document describes a system with one order to the links and success criteria of passing a test.

Other use cases include, pre-tests, reviews if the user fails the test, i.e. branched sequencing. Also some lessons might be passed without tests (just viewing the material), some only by instructor approval, and maybe some with some other criteria, like posting to a bboard. Thus we need the ability to specify different success criteria.

I am totally in favor of implementing only a subset of the general case functionality, with the subset being driven by the needs of whoever is doing the work. But it would be good to put references to what is not being implemented into the design documents as well as hooks and notes to allow the next developer to add on easily.

We put a little of our vision on how we saw Survey moving into the future in our RFP. I uploaded it into the .LRN extranet on SloanSpace. Email me if you need access and don't have an account.