How should the SS package (or other packages) create sequences?
Hey guys! There is a slight chance that what I'm going to rant about below is one step closer to Ernie's "open SS API" idea (or maybe not):
I am thinking about possible ways that we could author, import, and edit sequences since we most definitely should be able to do all three. Of course, it will have to be possible to export them too but let's not complicate things.
If I understand this correctly, IMS Content Packaging (CP) has an XML file called a "manifest" which describes the content items within a course and the actual content files is packed together with a manifest in a "IMS content package".
It is also my understanding that IMS CP can be extended with an SS "binding" which extends the XML schema so it is possible to define sequencing rules, either together with the items in the course manifest, or standalone.
I think it is true to state that LORSm imports meta-data and content (and places it in a back-end), and that SS will want to import just the SS rules part of the meta-data and not the content. In addition to the meta-data about each item (activity) it must know the object id that the "item" gets in LORSm, I believe, so that the SS package knows which object to map that particular activity to.
Now, one question is how this ought to be handled in the LORSm case and similar cases (which already have the ability to parse manifest files). For instance; if you import a course into LORSm from a content package and you want to be able to deliver the "items" of that course not by browsing the links in LORSm but in the order determined by the SS engine from the user's behaviour and the rules/condition of the sequence I guess you have to create the sequence first by dumping the manifest data in the SS
datamodel (after the course has been uploaded into LORSm). Maybe there should be an *open API* in the SS package for this that LORSm could hook up to while it is in the process of parsing the manifest in the first place
(if SS is installed, that is).
Does that make any sense?
