-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] skrev 07-05-2008 20:09: | 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?
I'd say it all depends -- chiefly on security/privacy concerns, see below. |> Or maybe have a Trac |> project for each student in class for managing that |> student's work? As far as I can tell, this might be a better approach. It all depends on the type of assignments etc -- but at least a personal trac for each student at a course/university would hands down beat all kinds of e-learning tools I've had the misfortune to be exposed to. If there is enough resources in your project to realize this, it would have the added potential benefit of merging personal student homepages, version control and backup of data, with a nice way to trac assignments... With an ldap backend it should be fairly simple to allow professors/teachers access to all the students' tracs, and giving each student a personal trac/svn. One might expand this to have project-level tracs for group assignments, providing a few easy scripts to automate the setup of trac-installations. (...) |> 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... I'd be very careful about this -- in my experience adding privacy to a system designed for openness can be difficult in the extreme. Before even attempting such a project be sure you've carefully modelled what privacy and security demands you will have. The classic problem is search indexinging and retrieval leaking sensitive information. (...) | -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. With some effort, it would be possible to use svn with auto-versioning and webdav, allowing less technical students to "ignore" the versioning aspect. I'd say they'd miss out -- but it might be difficult to introduce a new system (trac), a new way of thinking about versions (svn/mercurial) *and* forcing people to use something like LyX for writing essays. I'm sure the students would be *much* better off, than if they use Word/Openoffice -- but it might be a though sell. If you do get this approved, please let me know where you work, I might apply for a masters exchange program there! :-) (...) | 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. Absolutely. If you force this through administration without talking it over with IT, I suspect you'll have to do your own system administration, bugfixing and software installs for the foreseeable future -- and you can probably forget about hardware upgrades :-) | Good luck. Indeed, best of luck with your project. As an aside, I think trac has great potential for use in schools and colleges, and I think the community would benefit hugely down the road, both from English lit majors (documentation) and the more obvious computer science graduates. Best regards, - -- ~ .---. Eirik Schwenke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ( NSD ) Harald Hårfagresgate 29 Rom 150 ~ '---' N-5007 Bergen tlf: (555) 889 13 ~ GPG-key at pgp.mit.edu Id 0x8AA3392C -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIIyqRxUW7FIqjOSwRAjxjAJ9fSx7x6ZAV05YHBSXnqalsBwadYACcCLr6 7omzsqDE9W7YllKL58/yMOc= =Rtik -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
