[Building Sakai] lesson builder release 1 tagged

[Hedrick Charles]

Anyone who has tried Lesson Builder, I strongly recommend updating to the release 1 tag. Updating will require a restart of Sakai. It should not require any database changes as long as auto.ddl is on. (We use Hibernate, which will update the schema automatically. An sql file will be done at startup that creates indices, because of problems with Hibernate in managing indices. Our Hibernate usage is very conservative. The few joins that we do are hand-coded.)

Versions previous to the first RC had a serious security problem. Bugs between the RC's and final are less dramatic but significant. If you're planning to use it in production I'd appreciate being notified, so we can notify you of any further serious issues.

We have 100 sites in the Rutgers instance using it for the Spring, a number of which have of course already been using it for content preparation.

------------------------

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.




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3817 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20110118/014b741f/attachment.bin