Docs:Course design issues

The APEcs CBT material presentation system is not a static, complete system. There are a number of areas that could be improved, and each deployment of the system on a new or revised course has the potential to highlight areas that need modification. This page collects together the current status of research into design issues related to the course structure, and it may overlap with other areas of research (Wiki issues and the Course processor in particular).

Student annotation and collaboration

With some additional development, it should be possible to allow students to collaboratively share documents, images, and annotations related to steps within a course. The basic concept involves using a skinned wiki to support online material presentation and user interaction, and in order to make the idea work we will need:

1. A WikiOutputHandler module, to take content from the development wiki and process it into a wiki (either an xml dump+files, or direct into another wiki)
2. A mediawiki skin designed to emulate the appearance and navigation mechanisms currently used by course-processor generated CBT packages. This will require a from-scratch skin implementation, some mechanism to store navigation data in wiki step pages, and some way to use that data to create appropriate navigation controls in the generated content.
3. An AJAX system in step pages that:
   • modifies the page on the fly, integrating annotations and files added by students (with options to show no annotations, annotations only by the student, and all annotations)
   • provides the mechanisms to create such annotations and file uploads.

When a user is reading a step, the AJAX on the step page pulls any appropriate annotations from the step's discussion page in the background, and inserts them into the page. If a user clicks on the page, they are given the option to create an annotation, which may include uploading a file. Issues to consider involve things like:

• Logins. How to handle users - they will need logins, so that we can prevent spam, and keep track of who created which annotations or uploads. How to get users into the wiki during courses.
• Editing annotations. Should users be allowed to edit their own annotations, or anyone's? And how best to provide this in the UI.
• File security. Uploads need to be type-restricted to prevent malicious content (only images and pdfs? Mediawiki will take care of verifying that the file actually is the claimed type)
• Users must be online to use the wiki. This could, potentially, be done using a standalone wiki in a per-user local httpd/dbms/php system, but has significant complexity overheads for collaboration (primarily in pulling annotations from users into a central system without horrible problems)