Forum .LRN Q&A: Input sought from distance educators

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 03/14/03 05:26 PM

This is a permanent thread inviting current and prospective users of Blackboard, WebCT, Prometheus, or other course management systems to post their questions, complaints, and wish lists for dotLRN. Please let us know what you want to see in a system like dotLRN. Current community members, please post the URL for this thread anywhere that it will get attention from our target user base.

2: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 1)

Posted by Lamar Owen on 03/14/03 06:24 PM

I'm a professor with Anchor Baptist Bible College, as well as many other roles (including internet guru here, PostgreSQL RPM maintainer, nspostgres driver maintainer, and a few others). We are test-driving dotLRN for our needs.

The biggest thing I can see for distance education for us is online testing, whether multiple choice, fill in the blank, or essay questions. ArsDigita's Quizze module did a great job on multiple choice tests -- however, unless I am missing something, OACS doesn't have this module.

Also, a gradebook portlet for professors would be nice; transcript utilities for the registrar (with import from the gradebook, course); a catalog portlet (with interactive preregistration) would be cool as well. As I think of other things we could use I'll post.

3: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 03/14/03 07:40 PM

Malte Sussedorf has kindly made available an exam module they wrote for a client. Lamar, if you want to evaluate it I'll send you a tarball (e-mail me directly)

It's an OpenACS package that at the moment only supports Oracle but it didn't look like porting it would be hard.

Turning it into a dotLRN package would be easy, a couple days work ...

I have no idea whether or not it would suit your needs but it would be interesting to get your opinion.

4: Re: Input sought from distance educators, (response to 3)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 03/19/03 06:25 AM

Don
This (porting to PG) sounds like it could be a a short project for someone here. Would you like me to list it. Other projects are at:
http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/rafa/projects/

5: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 3)

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 03/19/03 07:55 AM

Hi Lamar,

I worked on the package that Malte had put available. The package although it is not not based on any question or test standards, it kinda has a similar structure as IMS Question & Test: Tests has sections, sections containt question, etc.

As of now, it does some cool things like branching, or randomization or questions and possible answers (multiple choice. So you can have a pull of 100 questions for a particular section and then you can select that only 30 random questions (out of the pool of a 100) can be rendered to the user in randomized order, or you could specified that the 5th questions is a particular question, etc.

It only support multiple-choice type of exams though. So when you create a new question, you have to enter an X number of answers and then select which ones are correct (one or many).

Since the answers are entered when the questions are entering the grading is automatic. Although, you have to decide what is the minimum % of correct answers that a random stiker needs to answer correct to be able to pass this section and take the next one.

Rafa, maybe we can get someone to work on the portining and improving a bit of the functionality (comply to some question or test standard?)... I can't really work on this right now, but I'm more than willing to help out if we can get someone to work on it.

In any case, Lamar, if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Ernie

6: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 1)

Posted by Alfred Essa on 03/20/03 03:16 AM

I agree that a quiz module is essential for dotLRN. Does it make sense to make it part of or a variant of complex survey. Once dotLRN v1 release is out, a number of us are thinking of jointly funding complex survey.

7: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 6)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 03/20/03 10:11 AM

Hi Al,

Ernie and I discussed making his Exam package use the Survey Module, but decided against it, as only simple survey was out at that time. IMHO it does make sense to reuse the (complex) survey code for that and "just" add the testing capabilities on top of it. This way we are not going to maintain two packages that have the same functionality. OTOH the exam package is out and working.

8: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 1)

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 03/21/03 12:40 AM

Michael et al,

Following the discussion about complex survey and the exam package, as Malte said, it would be cool if we could have the functionality to create different types of assessments within the complex survey module. The Blackboard dudes, for example, have provide the ability to create them both as part of their Assessment Manager tool.

Another think I would like to have, and might not be necessarily part of this package, is a grading package. There has been a discussion about this on the forums, but I don't think we arrived into any conclusions.

Papers, quizes, exams, etc should be able to be examined by a professor, TA, etc and be grading accordingly. Also, I think the grading of different items within a particular class should be able to add up to a final class score. However, I don't have much knowledge on how it is implemented in other platform, do you Michael?

In addition, and this might be a bit of a "really cool thing to have", a whiteboard. I have seen that there is an open source whiteboard available. Maybe, it could be a good idea to take a look at it.

Thank you,

Ernie

9: Re: Input sought from distance educators (response to 1)

Posted by manny quinto on 03/22/03 02:31 AM

It would be usefull if you could set a timer on the quiz module. :)