From Dokeos

Participants:

1. Bart Mollet (Hogeschool Gent)
2. Olivier Sourie (Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen)
3. Liesbeth De Blaere (Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen)
4. René Haentjens (UGent)
5. Stefaan Vanbillemont (Hogeschool Gent)
6. Roel Neefs (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
7. Patrick Roth (University of Geneva)
8. Olivier Jeannin (University of Geneva)
9. Jean-Marie Maes (Hogeschool Gent)
10. Frederik Questier (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
11. Thomas De Praetere (Dokeos Company)
12. Eric Marguin (Dokeos Company)
13. Michel Panckoucke (Hogeschool Gent)

Contents 1 Basic Thoughts about LCMS 2 Application and tool redesign 2.1 Dropbox, assignments, portfolio, student publications, group tools, documents 2.1.1 Overview 2.1.2 Discussion 2.2 Exercise, assignments, gradebook, peer assessment, poll/survey, SCORM LP, feedback on LO's, scoring of LO's 2.2.1 Overview 2.2.2 Discussion 2.2.2.1 Evaluation tools 2.2.2.2 Scoring 3 Advanced and specific features as external tools 4 Using external resources as learning objects 5 Using templates to create your course/community 6 Wiki vs Portfolio 7 Final conclusions

Basic Thoughts about LCMS

Bart starts with a small recapitulation about the terms and concepts used in the LCMS.

• Learning Object (LO): everything is a learning object: event, announcement, forum post, wiki page, categories ..
• Repository of Learning Objects: container where all LO's are stored (each user has a personal categorie to store his learning objects)
• Repository Category: category in the repository to organise your LO's (a category is also a learning object)
• Repository Data Manager: interface between the repository and the applications
• Applications: portfolio, weblcms, ..
• Components: each application is build up from different components (for example: in weblcms, subscribecomponent, coursecreatecomponent). Every functionality provided by the application is implemented in a different component.
• Tools: each component can have multiple tools
• Tool category: category in the weblcms tools to organise your LO publications
• Publication of Learning Objects: link between the applications and the repository

Application and tool redesign

We try to find out which tools have shared functionality and how we can solve this by redefining these tools. With the release of the WebLCMS system it is a good moment to do this. Can we combine some tools? Are there tools with are no longer needed? What part of the functionality is now offered through the repository?

After some brainstorming, we decided to discuss this in 2 parts:

1. Dropbox, assignments, portfolio, student publications, group tools, documents
2. Exercise, assignments, gradebook, peer assessment, poll/survey, SCORM LP, feedback on LO's, scoring of LO's

We have to keep in mind that to many drastic changes will have a negative effect on the users and the use of Dokeos. Otherwise a drastic change can also be the start to use the Dokeos tools in the right way.

Dropbox, assignments, portfolio, student publications, group tools, documents

Overview

Let's start with a look at the present functionality each tools offers:

Dropbox

• send file to one/more users, to one/more groups, only upload
• give feedback
• structure files in folders

Student publication

• upload files
• course admin can set swith to set the visibility of the uploaded files
• no folder structure is provided

Assignment tool

• define new assignments (set start/end date, individual/group assignment, only text/only file/text and file, ..)
• give feedback (two way feedback)

Besides those tools we also have:

• Document tool for course
• Document tool for groups

The Portfolio application is not in this list because a portfolio is list/template of publications from a user. It is not a part of the Weblcms application.

Discussion

Since all functionality of the student publication tool is also present in the assignment tool we can drop the student publication tool.

There is some discussion about the dropbox tool. Now it is used to share LO's between users of the course. In the LCMS this part of sharing objects is done by the repository and the roles and rights system. This is a completely new approach for all users.

If we extend the functionality of the assignment tool it can be accepted as 'the' tool for the right job

• providing folders and subfolders
• provide better feedback posibilities
• email notification when users submits an assignment? Is provided in the base tool class so extendible to other classes.

So we can conclude:

• extend functionality of the assignment tool
• drop the student publication tool

In the Weblcms every publication of a learning object can be done for everybody or for a subset of users and/or groups. There's no longer a need for a seperate document tool in the group area, or a seperate forum tool etc. All tools will be available for groups inside the tool itself.

This makes the group tool in a course only a group-organizing tool. Can this be combined in the user tool? More on this the next meeting!

Exercise, assignments, gradebook, peer assessment, poll/survey, SCORM LP, feedback on LO's, scoring of LO's

Overview

What kind of evaluation tools do we have at the moment?

• exercise (Dokeos exercises, HotPotatoes, ..)
• assignment
• gradebook
• peer assessment
• poll/survey
• SCORM Learning path with included tests
• evaluation of blogs

Other evaluation methods are proposed

• evaluation of forum topics
• in the end it should be possible to give a score to any kind of learning object publication. (For example: StudentA posts something in a forum and TeacherB can give a score for this publication)

Discussion

We can seperate two kind of concepts:

• grade/evaluate students/LO's
• tools to evaluate

Evaluation tools

When we simplify some tools they can be reduced to a set of questions types:

• assignment = test with only one question (open question: text area + document)
• poll = test with one question (multiple choice)
• survey = test with many questions (different question types)
• HotPotatoes = test in HTML files

Translating these ideas to the LCMS structure

• question is a learning object
• exercise is a learning object with some other learning objects (questions) attached to it
• poll = exercise (without scoring)

The image below tries to explain this:

It is possible to group everything together into learning objects of the type Question and Exercise and to have a single Evaluation tool in the course. But we think it's better to keep poll/survey and exercise as seperate entities. So in the course we should have

• a Exercise tool
• a Survey tool

Scoring

To implement the idea of making it possible to give a score to every publication, we should define the necessary functionality for this on a higher level. As we think it can be usefull to have scoring also available in other, future applications, these functions should be defined in the Application class. This way, all applications and their tools can share the common scoring-functions.

All these grades should be stored in the database and can be retrieved by different tools in different applications. Eg. the weblcms can have a course tool that displays all grades a user has earned for the LO's published in that specific course.

What about peer assessment? We could define a peer assessment type which can be connected/attacheted to other LO's like a forum topic. Users reading the forum topic can afterwards assess the author of the post. The same for uploaded documents, ..

Advanced and specific features as external tools

Thomas asked the question where functionality like Oogie and Woogie should be located in the LCMS structure. What we want to avoid is the need to change anything to the existing repository structure to include features like Oogie offers. Now, in Dokeos 1.8, there is code included to work with Oogie, even if you didn't install Oogie.

So for these more advanced features, it looks reasonable to implement them as seperate applications. Oogie is then defined as an application running on top of the learning object repository which gives your the possibilty to convert a learning object of the document type (in this case Powerpoint or OpenOffice presentations) into a new learning object of the type learning path.

Using external resources as learning objects

Patrick R. asked how we should implement the course description tool if we want to use external resources. For example, in a lot of European schools, ECTS descriptions are used for courses. Most times a school has these descriptions available somewhere.

At the moment there's a learning object of the type description defined in the repository. There's also a course tool description in a course which allows you to publish these types of learning objects.

A possible implementation for using the ECTS descriptions, is to define a new learning object type which keeps track of a url/identifier/... of the corresponding ECTS desription in the external database. When we configure the course description tool to also allow publications of this new type of learning object, our problem is solved.

As the newly created learning object type will provide the necessary functionality to display the ECTS descritption, our course tool should be concerned with questions like how should I dislplay this learning object.

Using templates to create your course/community

We had some brainstorming about courses and communities. A lot of courses in Dokeos are actually used as communities to share content with a group of users. The first idea was to have a seperate community-application next to the weblcms. But as a community uses more or less the same tools as a course (wiki, blog, forum,...), we think it's a good idea to define templates for course/community creation. These templates can define which tools are active, how the course/community-page is organized,...

Wiki vs Portfolio

What about the WIKI tool? How can we implement this? The easiest way is to install a external WIKI (like CoolWiki or PMWiki) and implement a WIKI LO that links to the external application. Disadvantage is the changes to wiki pages are not noticed.

More work to implement a complete WIKI tool/application inside the WebLCMS. Changes are noticed by the system so the user can be warned. We can make the same remark for blogs. For the first release of the WebLCMS we can start with linking to external applications.

If there is time we can implement our own Dokeos blog/wiki tools.

Final conclusions

• a lot of work to do
• we skipped the technical brainstorm due to lack of time (will be discussed on the next meeting)
• next meeting maybe half december? brainstorm + technical questions about the LCMS