[Building Sakai] Implement CourseManagementService ???

[Charles Hedrick]

How do your users get into the system? The course management service  
answers several different questions, but roughly speaking they all  
involve which users are in which sections. They have to have Sakai  
eid's to be listed.

The main difference between using a provider and loading them into the  
database is timing. Typically people who put data directly into the  
database run periodic cron jobs to do it. E.g. you might get a feed  
for administrative data overnight and then add new users and new  
course information in a nightly batch job. If you handle user creation  
that way it probably makes sense to handle course provisioning via a  
batch job as well.

At Rutgers users can create accounts at any time. After creating an  
account they are put into LDAP within about 30 min. We get our user  
data from LDAP. So we see new users fairly quickly. By using a course  
management provider, as soon a new user shows up, they are in their  
courses. If we did a nightly batch feed, new users wouldn't get their  
courses until the next day.

However the course data that our provider has access to is fed  
nightly. So we only get half the benefits of a real-time process. New  
users get into the system immediately, but the course list they see is  
from the last nightly batch run. We're working on that.

Of course there's nothing to stop you from writing a provisioning  
process that runs continuously and keeps the database up to date in  
real time.

In our case there's another advantage to using a provider: The group  
that maintains Sakai is separate from the groups that work on course  
and people data. Our providers talk to existing services whose APIs  
are reasonably well defined. So we can do development work without  
requiring much work on the other side. Doing a data feed would require  
a bit more coordination of three different groups. The question isn't  
a lack of cooperation, but reducing complexity. We're not the only  
people who need to use administrative data. Having a defined API that  
everyone can use to access is a better design.



On Jun 30, 2009, at 7:59 AM, Phuc Bui wrote:

> Thanks a lot John,
> As I said , I do not know about Quartz and getting lost in  
> implementing CourseManagementService :(
> When I tried Sakai demo data, I found something strange, such as  
> users who enrolled in the course may not be a Sakai users ??? So  
> those users have to register to Sakai system and to that course  
> site , don’t they?
> So I want to do them all by a tool.
> But I do not know what I’m thinking is right or not, so I need your  
> suggestion :)
>
> Thanks for your helps.
> Phuc Bui
>
> From: John Bush [mailto:john.bush at rsmart.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 11:19 PM
> To: Phuc Bui
> Cc: 'Sakai Mailing List'
> Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Implement CourseManagementService ???
>
> You can do all that with the SiteService.  I'm not sure why you want  
> it to be a tool?  Is there some sort of UI you are imaging?  Sakai's  
> has a job scheduler built on top of quartz.  If you don't have a UI,  
> its a lot easier to use that mechanism to simply schedule your job  
> (nightly, hourly, whatever) which could then create the sites and  
> memberships for you automatically.
>
> John Bush
> Development Manager
> rSmart
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 28, 2009, at 8:44 AM, Phuc Bui wrote:
>
>
> Dear,
> Unluckily, we do not very good at web services and do not know about  
> Quartz :(
> I think implementation CourseManagementService is quite complex to  
> us. Now I do not know how to implement ???
> So I am considering a way to write a tool for admin that’s  
> responsible for :
> -          Create a course site with data given by external database  
> (academic term, course information…).
> -          After creating a course site, we add users to that site  
> (all students and instructors will be registered as Sakai users  
> before).
> I think the advantage of that way is that: instructors do not worry  
> about how to create a course site, everything is done automatically.  
> They just enter website and choose their course site then do their  
> job.
>
> So I would like to ask whether it is possible or not ?
> If it is, which API can be used to create a course site, and add  
> available Sakai users to a course site ?
>
> Thanks for your replies,
> Phuc Bui
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