User:Pcool

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My real name is Patrick Cool. The best way to contact me is to send an e-mail to the following address: patrick.cool (a) UGent.be (I'm making this email address a bit awkard because I hope that e-mail harvesters (who result in receiving huge quantities of spam) will overlook this email address. the (a) stands for @ of course.)

ICT&O @ UGent

In my professional life I work at the Ghent University. I'm a member of the ICT&O team of the Ghent University. ICT&O stands for "Informatie en communicatietechnologie in het onderwijs", which is Dutch for "Information and communication technology for education". The ICT&O team is responsible for the e-learning environment of the Ghent University (called Minerva: http://minerva.ugent.be, but you have to be a employee or student of the Ghent University to access this site).

Dokeos @ UGent

One of the components of the e-learning environment Minerva is the course management system Dokeos. The Minerva server has more than 2000 Dokeos courses on it for about 23.000 users. This makes the UGent Dokeos implementation probably the largest Dokeos platform in the world. We started with Claroline in 2003 for our course management system but when the split happened we chose for Dokeos as Dokeos was much more open for our input and developments. And time has proven us right.

UGent developments in Dokeos

Since the start of Dokeos we have added several features and changed or added several tools which really make a difference and which are an essential part of Dokeos now. Maybe it is interesting to have a (non exhaustive) list:

Dokeos 1.8

  • New forum tool
    • better integration with the rest of Dokeos
    • consistency
    • locking threads, forums and forum categories
    • change the visibility of threads, forums and forum categories
    • sticky messages
    • multiple forums for a group are now possible
    • forums and forum categories can now be sorted
    • forum setting to allow or deny students to edit their own message
    • forum setting to require approval of a teacher for a post
    • forum setting to allow or deny students to create new posts. If it is denied then the students can only reply to existing threads
    • new view on a thread: nested
  • Improved dropbox
    • dropbox documents can now be categorised which makes the handling of large amounts of documents a lot easier
    • same action on multiple documents. You now no longer have to delete documents one by one but you can select several documents and delete them all at once.
    • zip download of multiple files at once or a complete folder at once
    • consistency with the other Dokeos modules
  • Improved Agenda tool
  • extension: agenda recurrence
  • extension: ical export
  • course management: protection with password, approval of subscription
  • block user on platform level
  • block user on course level
  • timelimit on validity of user account for the platform
  • Platform management: new plugin spaces, easy adding of plugins
  • group: multiple tutors, tutors = admin rights within the scope of the group
  • sorting of user defined course categories
  • LaTeX gif rendering
  • User language in profile.
  • Code cleanup
  • survey tool
  • extended profile enhancements
  • ...
  • Bugfixes for Dokeos 1.8 alpha and beta, 1.8 RC 1, 1.8 RC 2, 1.8 RC 3, 1.8.0 and 1.8.2 and

1.8.3 and 1.8.4

Dokeos 1.6 and prior

  • What's new icons on the my courses homepage
  • tracking tables: language independant
  • forum: some initial functional changes like thread locking, flat (chronological) or threaded view, e-mail notification, start of the wysiwyg editor, adding resources (attachments). For Dokeos 1.8 the whole forum tool has been thoroughly rewritten.
  • groups: allow users to unregister from groups (this is code that Roan made when he was a member of the ICT&O team)
  • student publications: default visibility of uploaded documents
  • my courses: what's new
  • student view (initial code by Roan, changed significantly by myself)
  • my agenda (the initial code is from Eric Remy): overview of the agenda items of all the courses
  • my agenda: day, week, month view
  • personal agenda that allows every user to store private agenda items
  • my profile: adding a picture
  • course start page: greying out inactive tools + each tool has its own fixed place throughout the courses
  • link tool: complete make-over. New concepts: categories, link visible on the course homepage.
  • resource linker: allows adding resources to a forum message, an agenda item, ...
  • learning path: the initial developments and proof of concept code were made by ICT&O but we handed the codes over to Denes Nagy who took over all the developments for this tool. Yannick Warnier has now taken over this tool and developed in a much profesional way.
  • tool shortcuts: switching from one tool to another without going to the course homepage
  • Documents tool: complete redesign + integrating the groups documents tool, mod rewrite
  • Documents tool new concepts: slideshow, download icon, download complete folder at once, securing download, editing new html document
  • Group tool: unsubscribing of users is made a setting + integrating the group documents tool in the document tool code.
  • Course management: adding of personal categories and sorting of courses.
  • Dropbox: one to one document sharing (a development by Jan Bols made for the ICT&O team). RenĂ© Haentjens did some work on this tool and the ICT&O team has continued this development. There are new functionalities added and the layout has been drastically changed so that it integrates more with dokeos.
  • LaTeX through TechExplorer plugin
  • Agenda Tool: complete make-over + adding new concepts of groups and user agenda items
  • Announcements: complete tool has been redone by UGent by merging the two independant tools (announcements and messages to groups/users). Consistency with the Agenda tool
  • Dokeos Config Settings
  • Abstraction of generic item properties
  • LDAP authentication
  • Student Publication: default visibility of newly uploaded documents.
  • Metadata (RenĂ© Haentjens)
  • Mailer Class
  • Dokeos Language Translation Tool
  • Dokeos Extensions page
  • Some Dokeos Extensions: rss reader, Poll, Reservation tool, Peer review, myDLTT, CoolWiki, Analog clock, tiny agenda, silver bullet css, ...
  • various little changes and optimalisations in the code.
  • Bugfixes for Dokeos 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.3, 1.6.3 and 1.6.4 and patch 1

As you can see from the list above, the ICT&O team has already contributed quite a lot to the Dokeos course management system.

My Contributions to Dokeos

For the Dokeos CMS

New Developments

  • Many of the changes that are mentioned above are my work (not all though). I will not mention them all here

Bugfixes

There are quite some bugfixes I have made (and the list is far from complete) so I created a new page for this Pcool goes bughunting

For the Dokeos Community

Dokeos Language Translation Tool

Dokeos Language Translation Tool a.k.a DLTT: http://www.dokeos.com/DLTT I have written the tool that manages all the translations. I was fed up with the inconsistencies in the translations, the duplication that occurred in several places, ... Nobody knew which language had the most complete language variables and it appeared that no language was complete (even English). I wrote some code to see if it could work and which database design I would need. At first I added only a very limited amount of variables and a very limited number of files. I quickly realised that I had to automate the adding of variables so that the existing variables could quickly be used in the DLTT. I realised that starting from scratch was simply not an option. I then dedicated quite some time to writing a parser and thanks to bmollet I obtained a rather good parser (using a php function that I had never used thusfar but which became my closest ally in the DLTT adventure). After the parsing I ended up with a database containing all the variables and all the translations. I just had to write some pages to reflect the needed functionality of what I had in mind and DLTT was born.

Dokeos Extensions

Dokeos Extensions: http://www.dokeos.com/extensions

Plugins

Tools

Stylesheets

Icon Packs

To do

  • add CSS style switcher to CVS
  • add group overview to the CVS
  • add user export to the CVS
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