Help Building a new VLE

[Face-Man]

If you want to see you competition imJack - Communicate. Collaborate. Learn. is being given free to schools

[Jack]

Right, this is what I would do.

 

• Straight off the bat, LDAP integration. Users can then login to your system with their domain usernames and passwords, and is one less thing to remember and go wrong.
  
• Sort out some different types of users and groups. Global admins, school admins (IT, music tech...etc), teachers, students...etc. See if you can automate this by getting information from OUs and things.
  
• Try and get your hands on an export from SIMS or EBS or another big MIS system and see if you can import some of the information into your system. Even better would be to get the data "live" from the MIS system so that you don't actually store it anywhere. This removes you from a lot of data protection rubbish and you don't have to worry about it because you're not storing any data.
  

 

Once you've got that down, you can shelve all that and leave it alone. Next comes things like making courses, uploading documents...etc, but all that will come naturally once you have the basic framework down.

 

You will probably find that people will be a lot more willing to talk and share ideas once you have a basic shell of a program down and they have something to work with instead of a blank canvas.

[sahmeepee]

If you want to see you competition imJack - Communicate. Collaborate. Learn. is being given free to schools

 

I still had someone trying to sell it to me quite recently. Seems like they've relaunched it since they were last pushing it 18-24 months ago.

 

God knows where the SSAT get off with all these commercial companies they keep pushing at^W^W endorsing to schools. If it's not IMJack it's some (non-free) network auditing service.

 

TBH IMJack looks a bit chucked together.. I'd be aiming a bit higher than that!

[Jay]

Not been able to read all of the (lenthy) posts, but If you really really are going to go for it....

 

MIS intergration...

 

1) Sims.Net (Capita) supports IMS export

2) Serco Facilty has an API to export data (IMS format too I think)

3) Pearson e1 has a Web Data Services (web services) tool to extract data in bulk. Although they write the reports upon request, they also have a "Report Writer" tool that allows data extraction at a school level.

4) Pearson Phoenix Gold has an IMS export tool (or so I'm informed)

 

I don't think may MIS providers permit the import of data. I've been told that Capita have a tool for it (at extra cost) but not sure on the others.

 

As you can see from the list, understanding and supporting the IMS formats are a must. Becta has also mandated SIF as the future mechanism for data exchange, the core data set is fairly similar to IMS core and the eduPerson LDAP schema. All the suppliers above and more are working on or already have SIF agents.

 

For authentication and access control, Shibboleth is the mantra in higher and further education and is gradually devolving down to school level.

 

You can find out more via Internet2 (Shibboleth) and Oasis (eduPerson schema, IMS plus SCORM). Edustructures are the leading provider of SIF software (Zone Intergration Server and development tools), the UK data schema is authoured by a SIFA working group.

 

You might want to start by building a core set of modules to facilitate interoperability and intergration and not worry about the features until later. Most technical people are happy with simple systems that "just work" and don't care about the bells and whistles so much (IMO).

Edited December 3, 2008 by Jay