| Scott E. Siddall | |
| Denison University |
The Denison pilot of CourseWork
| Gain first-hand experience | |
| Involve faculty and students | |
| Compare with commercial offerings and unbundled information services |
| Sun LX50 running Solaris 5.8 | |
| Apache, Java 1.3, Tomcat 3, Oracle 9i | |
| CourseWork release 2.1 | |
| Linked to phpBB for discussion |
| English | |
| Political Science | |
| Modern Language | |
| One 16-week semester |
| Support | ||
| Two 1-hr training session with faculty | ||
| One 30 minute in-class presentation | ||
| 6 hrs spent in system administration in 16 weeks | ||
| Faculty perspective | ||
| Students aren’t well prepared to use CMS | ||
| Much content is not “CMS ready” | ||
| What is the value of integrating information services? | ||
| Student perspective | ||
| CourseWork was “transparent” | ||
| See also a presentation at CLAC conference | ||
Ohio Foundation of
Independent Colleges
pilot of CourseWork and CHEF
| Provide immediate, first-hand experience for experiments and courses | |
| Installation, hosting and support by | |
| The Longsight Group (http://longsight.com) |
| One Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual processor, 4 Gb memory, 216 Gb RAID | ||
| RedHat Linux 9 | ||
| Apache 2, Java 1.4, Tomcat 4, PostreSQL | ||
| CourseWork 2.5; CHEF 1.1.09 | ||
| For both: load problems with connector between Apache and Tomcat | ||
| Mod_j2k connector | ||
| couple of bugs logged with Apache project | ||
| went with an Apache Reverse Proxy instead | ||
Technical experience: CourseWork 2.5
| Stanford look and feel | |||
| Uses pictures of pillars and Stanford colors | |||
| Not easy to edit: graphics coalesced | |||
| Used the Cambridge layout instead | |||
| Cambridge 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 | |||
| No discussion board software | |||
| No easy way to integrate with 3rd-party discussion tools | |||
| CourseWork creates obtuse passwords (random negative integers) | |||
| We created Java classes that create "speakable" passwords using only letters | |||
| Easier to remember | |||
| CourseWork 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 | |||
Technical experience: CourseWork 3.0
| Cambridge port vs. Stanford code | ||
| Needed to re-integrate PostgreSQL functionality back into new Stanford code | ||
| CourseWork 3.0 is not database-independent like many open-source projects | ||
| Needed to reintegrate all custom Longsight fixes/features from CourseWork 2.5 | ||
| Cambridge release of CourseWork 2.x includes features in Cocoon | ||
| Created our own source repository of clean, PostgreSQL-compatable CourseWork 3.0 | ||
| No place to report bugs back to Stanford (Bugzilla) | ||
Technical experience: CHEF 1.1.09
| Stores elements in the database using XML | ||
| additional level of complexity to debug/add functionality to | ||
| New terminology | ||
| realms, sites, workspaces | ||
| Student self-registration didn’t match small college faculty expectations | ||
| Passwords are not accessible to system administrator but can be reset | ||
| CourseTools NG contains some U of Michigan-specific elements | ||
| creating course sites | ||
| Look and feel is relatively hard to edit | ||
| Support | ||
| One three-hour training session for campus support staff | ||
| Online email helpdesk – 24 hr response time | ||
| Faculty perspective | ||
| Enthusiastic and successful without prior CMS experience; want to continue in Fall ‘04 | ||
| Want more options for assessment | ||
| Most drawn to CHEF for discussion and interaction | ||
| Drawn to CourseWork for its interface structure and repository | ||
| Student perspective | ||
| Once again – transparent and successful | ||
| Some feature limitations, such as: | ||
| Ungraded assignments | ||
| Multiple correct responses in multiple choice questions | ||
| Longer interval for timed activities | ||
| More categories of copyright status (i.e., TBD) | ||
| Sought after assessment tools | ||
| Sakai Assessment Manager | ||
| Very few system issues with these open source applications | |
| User problems resolved in 1-24 hrs | |
| Relatively low training requirements | |
| Basic CMS tools meet high percentage of needs | |
| OFIC Open Source CMS Pilot Program continues in fall semester | ||
| Pedagogically-designed features from small colleges | ||
| Sakai Assessment Manager | ||
| Combination of Indiana’s Navigo and Stanford’s Assignment & Assessment Manager | ||
| Sakai Project | ||
| Return to home |