April 22, 2004
EDUCAUSE Midwest
Regional Conference
Technical
experience: CourseWork 2.5
nStanford look and feel
–Uses pictures of pillars and Stanford colors
–Not easy to edit:
graphics coalesced
–Used the Cambridge layout instead
nCambridge port vs. Stanford code
–Cambridge port included hacks to handle PostgreSQL and
Oracle
–About 10-12 bugs that we fixed
§no centralized location to handle bugs, fixes, and
patches
§Sourceforge code managed by Cambridge
nNo discussion board software
–No easy way to integrate with 3rd-party discussion
tools
nCourseWork creates obtuse passwords (random negative
integers)
–We created Java classes that create
"speakable" passwords using only letters
–Easier to remember
nCourseWork has no mechanism to send a user a forgotten
password
–We created custom Java code to send a user a lost
password
–We also created custom PHP code that super-users could
use to view all user accounts/emails/passwords