[Portfolio] [Building Sakai] release 1 SP1 of Lesson Builder

John Norman john at caret.cam.ac.uk
Sun Dec 19 10:38:57 PST 2010


This line of thinking is part of how we see portfolios working in Sakai OAE, so we will be watching with interest :-)

John

On 19 Dec 2010, at 17:22, Hedrick Charles wrote:

> No I hadn't. But that's because I wasn't thinking creatively enough. I was thinking of Lesson Builder as something for site owners, but not for end users. I think it would need some work, but it might well make sense. I'd love to work with someone on it. The high school student who wrote Lesson Builder won't be back until the summer, so until then the amount of development time is what I can do in my free time. There are a couple of key features I still need to do for the needs I had thought of. But Rutgers is definitely looking for alternatives in portfolios, and this has some promise.
> 
> On Dec 19, 2010, at 7:23:15 AM, Sean Keesler wrote:
> 
>> Charles,
>> 
>> Have you considered using Lesson Builder as a simple portfolio
>> authoring environment at Rutgers?
>> I was able to edit the !site.template.portfolio realm and add the
>> lesson builder perms needed (without which you get a stack trace) and
>> add the portfolio and my workspace site types to the
>> sakai.simplepagetool.xml file and was sort of thinking that this was a
>> pretty easy way to a new "portfolio site", with the whole worksite
>> being my portfolio.
>> 
>> Of course, in that use, adding assignments, quizzes may not make
>> sense....but leveraging a discussion forum might be commenting on
>> steroids.
>> 
>> As this gets fleshed out, I wonder if creating a new site could create
>> a site with some staged content as starter material for portfolios.
>> 
>> Sean Keesler
>> 130 Academy Street
>> Manlius, NY 13104
>> 315-682-0830
>> sean.keesler at threecanoes.com
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Hedrick Charles <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I have just tagged RC1 for a release 1 of lesson builder. We're planning a release 1 for use in the Spring.
>>> I've recently put a lot of work into the UI. You can now do the equivalent of Moodle lessons, with branching depending upon how you answer a question. (You insert the question as a text box, and then put buttons or links under it for the answers.)
>>> If you had installed a previous version, please update, if only for security reasons. A minor database change should happen automatically as long as auto.ddl is on.
>>> See the confluence page, http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/LB/Contrib+-+Lesson+Builder, for more information and a few screen shots.
>>> ================
>>> 
>>> Lesson Builder is a way to structure content. Use cases include
>>> 
>>> Online courses, which often want to structure material by unit or week. It must be easy to link to quizes and assignments, and to handle common types of content.
>>> Online training, which needs to define sequences of material.
>>> Online certification, which needs to require certain items to be done, and sometimes to limit access until prerequistes are met.
>>> 
>>> Major features
>>> 
>>> The tool is intended to be present more than once in a site. Each unit or week of a course might be a separate instance, appearing in the left margin.
>>> 
>>> The primary interface for faculty is a page editor modeled conceptually on the Sakai 3 page editor. You can insert any combination of widgets. These include web content (with the usual FCK editor), resources (either as separate windows or inline in an iframe), and individual tests/quizes (currently only Samigo, but Mneme support is planned), assignments, and discussion forum topics (from Message Center Discussion or JForum). We try to use an appropriate player for all multimedia content types. You can reorder pages using a drag and drop reorder tool from the Fluid project. There is introductory documentation builtin.
>>> 
>>> For tools we don't support, if you can invoke them by a URL, you can insert it, and we'll do the Javascript magic to adjust the size of the iframe properly.
>>> 
>>> In addition to these pages that appear in the left margin, additional pages may be created. These can be either subpages or "next" pages. (The difference is whether breadcrumbs show a return to the current page or whether the new page replaces the current one.) You can also choose to add links to existing pages. You can use a button instead of a link. The most common approaches will probably be (1) a link to a subpage, (2) a "next" button at the bottom of a page going to a new page, (3) a Moodle-style dispatch, with buttons for several pages, labelled as answers to a question.
>>> 
>>> It is possible to set items to be required. A page is marked as finished when all required items have been done. For tests and assignments you can specify a minimum score.
>>> 
>>> It is possible to set items so that they are not accessible until all required items above them have been done.
>>> 
>>> It is possible to hide an instance, and to release on a specific date. Currently we can't hide individual pages, but only the set of pages that appear as a single entry in the left margin. When an instance is hidden, you can optionally hide all the tests, quizes and assignments that appear in the instance. (To be compatible with the way we do selective release, this is done by creating a group for the quiz or assignment, initially with no one in it, and making the quiz/assignment released to that group. When an item is marked as not available until other items have been completed, the same group is used, with people being added to the group as they complete the prerequisites.)
>>> 
>>> We think the tool is fully internationalized. (I put it that way because I keep finding hardcoded English text.) There is a group planning to use it in Spanish.
>>> 
>>> I have made an attempt to make it accessible, but I'd appreciate reviews by actual users of assistive technology.
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> 
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> 
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John Norman
Director - CARET
University of Cambridge
john at caret.cam.ac.uk
+44-1223-765367





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