[Phpgroupware-developers] E-Learning-phpgw

[Alex Borges]

--disclaimer.....this is just a preview...more to come tomorrow---
Lex is tired.

Ive been speaking to eald about this e-learning tidbit. We have our next
big milestone ending october, its the 'grades' application.

Let me walk you guys through the features needed:


a) Users have to have PErson information and should be categorized into
Alumni, Teachers, Parents and Administrators
..
..
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(lots of elearning features like email, shared calendars (for class
schedules) ...etc.... go here....i will focus on the grades app for now)
..
..
..


b) Grades speciffic features:
        1.- Alumni have to be able to come in and see their grades by 
        subject. THis means he will come in and see a list of the 
        subjects he is taking this semester (or generically, period) and        
see a
report of his grades
        2.- Teachers have to go in and see what grades have they 
        reported for each of the subjects they teach
        3.- Administrators have to be able to import this data, 
        relationships with teachers, alumni and subjects included.


So, to cover this, we think:

a) Users can belong to groups (alumni, techers, admins) so we can
control access to the diferent applications 

b)
        1.- Alumni come in and see a drop-down of the possible subjects 
        they are taking and a condensed report of all the subjects they 
        take.
        Global "phpgw" categories can do this.
        2.- Teachers come in and see the same drop-down but of the 
        subjects (this means also 'courses') they TEACH. They can see 
        the grades they reported and maybe (if acl permits) even edit 
        them. 
        Global phpgw cats do this
        3.- Adminscome in and see groupings of courses (like, 
        high-school-4th-grade, under that the corresponding courses). 
        Then they can go into that particular curse to upload, download 
        or edit in bulk all the grades of that particular course.


Infrastructural requirements.-
Now, smart readers will realize that actually, global phpgw categories
are not the best thing for the job....but they will be. We will add acl
for them so that only the ones teachers should see, will shown in the
drop down...same goes for the rest of it. (all changes in HEAD of
course)

Now, this also needs a good import/export infrastructure that can
receive excel and/or CSV files to modify, add or delete stuff from a
particular course....I think we will hook this to the async framework
combined with the filemanager (which is already modiffied by me -not in
16- to import and update any data from reading the actual directory)

Speaking of this, let me tell you something about the design:

We define a course as a subject taken by a set of students, imparted by
a teacher on a given time frame.

We think it is only modelable as a global phpgw category with some
modifications to them such as acl readyness and a true blue fix for the
"cat names cannot be repeated problem".

This will enable us to use course names so that users can identify any
data related to a course, be it in the addressbook, the calendar, the
infolog, the filemanager....actually, any app that supports categories.

So courses are the tie glue we use to link any info that happens in a
prticular course.



Now.... im thinking we need to publicize this effort and it has the
potential to attract new developers from the educative side of the
industry. Im going to try and do that, give it its own site and all. But
i do want to keep it as a mere phpgw application, included in the
savanah cvs too (yes, it will be fully GPL).



Lex