[Building Sakai] Lesson Builder Common Cartridge import check into trunk

[Hedrick Charles]

Lesson Builder now has Common Cartridge import. CC import is being done through Lesson Builder because you need Lesson Builder in a site to properly reflect the structure of material in Common Cartridge. Results are generally similar to importing the same material into Blackboard (although with slightly better navigation) with one exception:

For Forum Topics, I create the topic, and insert a link to it in the appropriate Lesson Builder page. However for assessments, I can't quite do this. I import the assessment, but I put a placeholder in the Lesson Builder page. It turns out not to make sense to try and create a final version of an assessment that I can link to. Links in Lesson Builder only make sense for published assessments, since that's all a student can see.

The issues are different for Samigo and Mneme (both of which are supported):

Samigo: I create a "core assessment", i.e. an assessment that isn't published. Because the ability to edit assessments is limited once they are published, it did not seem to make sense to create a published assessment. The assumption is that you will want to review the assessment and then publish it. You'll need to find the placeholder link and choose the published assessment to make the link work.

Mneme: Mneme does not appear to have an API call to load an assessment. External loads create a question pool. In Mneme, unlike Samigo, you can't enter questions directly into an assessment. All questions are entered in a pool, and then an assessment is based on the pool. Thus it seemed to make sense to import the Common Cartridge assessments as pool. As in Samigo, you'll need to create a publish the actual assessment, and link to it from Lesson Builder.

If users turn out to want Lesson Builder to publish assessments built in some default way, I'm willing to do it. It's not hard. But my first thought was that it wouldn't make sense.

––––––-

Lesson Builder is currently part of the trunk build. Thus it will be in 2.9. I'm going to be adding a number of new things this summer. However the intent is that the 2.9 version will be a bit conservative, for reasons of stability. It will have Common Cartridge import, and possibly a few other features, but most of the new code from this summer will be in 2.10 (or an indie release of Lesson Builder in late Fall).

For details on status and plans, see https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/LB/Contrib+-+Lesson+Builder

I hope to have Common Cartridge export for 2.10. The goal of import for 2.9 is primarily to import publisher content. For 2.10 the goal will be to use Common Cartridge to move sites between systems. Lesson Builder is significantly more powerful than the "organizer pages" in the commercial systems. Thus the generic export will lose some of the sequencing features. We're hoping to add extensions to the format so that if you import into another Sakai site more of the structure will be maintained. It's going to come down to how much time I have to do development. This is also a possible way to move content to Sakai 3, assuming that Common Cartridge is implemented there (and to the extent that Sakai 3 has features equivalent to those of Lesson Builder).

Note that implementing export (and extending import to handle Sakai-specific features) will be significantly more complex than import. Thus this section is a goal, but there's no way to be absolutely sure how much of it will be done.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20110601/eb0334f3/attachment.html 
-------------- 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/20110601/eb0334f3/attachment.bin