On May 7, 11:56 am, Aaron Watters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi folks. I'm interested in tools for online education > and it occurs to me that in many ways online courses > can be a bit like development projects. > > Would it be feasible to set up Trac to support managing > assignments and deliverables between an instructor > and a group of students? Or maybe have a Trac > project for each student in class for managing that > student's work? > > Here each assignment might > be a ticket and the deliverables would be accumulated > as ticket attachments -- or maybe you folks have better > ideas... > > A key concern, of course, would be privacy and security > -- only the student and the instructor(s) should see the > deliverables and grading comments for that student, and > it would be great if there was a special field called "grade" > that could only be modified by the intructor... Also, a > university would probably like to manage usernames > and passwords centrally and stuff like that... > > Sorry if this is crazy, if so just tell me I'm dumb and > I'll slink off into the shadows again... > Any thoughts? > -- Aaron Watters > I think this could be done. It would requires some coding for ticket handlers, etc.
I am a relative noob, but here is what I would see as needing to be done: -Install a private Tickets plugin, so students could only see their own tickets (there seem to be a couple that could do this, I haven't used em) -Add a custom field (or fields as needed) to tickets to have things like: grade, due date (or maybe you use milestones for that for the entire class?), etc. -For your personal improvement, you might want to use the TimingandEstimation plugin, so you could put in an estimate, and the students could put in actual work time (totally optional) -potentially: rather than attachment, use subversion for "submissions" of class assignments. Not sure the nature of the courses, and it DOES put the burden of requiring the students to create a working copy, no big deal for CS classes etc., might be overkill for say, Literature 101. TortiseSVN is pretty easy to use. That said in real life I am finding it nice to have version control on my day 2 day docs, so could be a best practices prep for corporate life. Plus then you can have them submit as they go and you could use the history of the files to see their work progress (and struggles) again if they so choose to be diligent. - one way to give feedback on grades etc that is private, you might just provide a SINGLE custom report that gives back data to the current user only, or something like that. I would suspect you might have to code some specialized hooks for SVN if you use it, maybe even having a separate(read:private) branch for each student. And maybe have to write some special ticket/workflow handlers etc to really get exactly what you want, but it sure sounds plausible. (and kinda cool, in a geeky way) If you happen to find a way to get a private "journal" for each student that is visible only to them and/or only editable by them, that would be helpful as well, although ticket comments could be used for that as well. you also probably want the students to create "I need help" tickets, kinda like virtual office hours. Not sure if you want those public or not. (I would say yes, if everyone is having the same issue, then you can address it singularly) Maybe an optional "private" field in the ticket? I could see these things be extremely useful in make the course better over time, as well as responding more quickly (or, should I say, identifying) systemic flaws or assumptions in the student bodies grasp of foundation concepts, and correctly early rather than finding out at the final that nobody got "topic in week one build on for the rest of the course" they way you expected. That said, it could be quite a big task to get it in place, working, and also working with/on your internal campus IT system. Good luck. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Users" group. To post to this group, send email to trac-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
