Features

Some of the high level features of the Education Module:

Course Management

• Using simple web forms professors can create and administer a class without using any HTML.

• Course administrators can make course materials avialable to students simply by uploading files.

• Course administrators can grade student homework online, providing comments and feedback that the students can see. In addition, all of the graders will be able to input their information into a shared grade book thus allowing for automatic grade calculations and histograms.

• Permissions can be selectively set the permissions for the administration pages. Thus, a professor can give Teaching Assistants permission to add and remove students from the class but not grade the assignments.

• Students can self enroll in the class and the professor has the ability to limit enrollment or make a class private so that only users enrolled in the class can see the class pages and assignments.

• Course administrators can email the only the teaching staff or everyone in the class. All of these emails are archived so that they may be references later.

• Every class can have multiple bulletin boards and news sections using the build in functionality provided by the ArsDigita Community System.

• Classes can be broken down into sections (recitations) and teams. These subgroups of can then have their own threaded discussion forums and chat rooms.

• Teams can be assigned to projects and can submit progress reports. In addition, course administrators can submit team evaluations into the grading system.

Departments

• Departments can easily create and display a course catalog to students and faculty alike.

• Department administrators Aggregated course enrollment, course announcements, grades, and course conten Personal Tools Editor (Tasks, Calendar, Contacts, etc.) Course Cataloging

Personalization

• Users can keep the personal events in the system using the calendar, provided as part of the portals system. The calendar allows users to enter personal information that will appear on the same calendar that contains all of the important datas for all of the classes for which the user is subscribed.

• When viewing past assignments, students will see their grades and comments left by the grader, if the grader selects the "show student" option when filling out the grading form.

• When users log in, they see their customizable portal page. This page is customizable so users can view information about all of their classes on the same front page. This page provides the user with easy access to information about their classes as well as important information relating the the institute.

• Users with different roles within the system can be given different views of the system. For instance, when a student logs in they will see news about thier classes but when an administrator logs in they will see information about when the next faculty meeting is.

Community

• The teaching staff can privately share documents among themselves for review before allowing students to see the document. This allows professors to collaboratively go through many drafts of an assignment or its solutions before allowing the studnet to view it.

• The Bulletin Boards and Chat rooms have been set up so that each class and recitation can have their own instance. So, recitations can hold discussions on their own bulletin board and entire classes can share the chat room to collaborate on assignments or study for tests.

• Users can easily be emailed based on their role within the system. For instance, a professor can email the teaching staff or an entire class. Or, the department can email all students taking a class within the department.

• Most importantly, since the Education Module is tied in with the rest of the ArsDigita Community System, where a more complete view of the user can be seen. For instance, it is possible to view all public postings to bulletin boards by a particular user. In addition, the user can make themselves known to other uses by doing anything from uploading a picture of themselves into their user profile to creating their own personl homepage using the homepage module.

Other

• Auditing of data so you can see:
  • who made the changes
  • when the changes were made
  • what changed
  • the history of all states the data have been in (so your data are never lost)

What's Coming in Future Versions

• Multi roled departments so that administrators can easily manage their members by lumping them into groups such as secreatries, professors, students, and alumni.

• The ability to easily browse and search through classes and subjects.

• Using simple forms, the class administrator will be able to upload desired information about students into the Oracle database. In addition, department administrators will be able to perform bulk upload of the classes offered during the coming semesters.

• Ability to download the personalized calendar into a palm pilot.

• Ability for professors to upload their own custom HTML pages that will interact with the current system (right now, they prof can use the homepage module to do this but we would like to provide an easy way to tie the two modules together).

• Students and professors alike can search through uploaded course material including handouts and presentation.

• Ability for students to privately annotate course material.

• The ability for professors to upload graphics to give each page a custom look and feel for the class.

• we hope to tie this module in with the home pages and wimpy point modules thus allowing students to create their home page within the system as well as allowing professors to link lecture notes directly to wimpy point presentations.

• Integration with the homepage module so that students and professors can create personal home pages. In addition, this will provide more freedom for professors when creating their class homepage.

• Integration with wimpy point so that professors can easily create lectures online.

• Very distant future - the ability to administer exams online.

• and much, much more...if you have any suggestions, please email them to us at the addresses below.