CyberCourse: distro for authoring courses

Posted by mathieso on August 30, 2014 at 1:38pm

CyberCourse is a Drupal distro for authoring courses. It focuses on university skills courses, like programming, writing, and math. It makes flipped, blended, assessment-driven classes practical.

Build a course with many exercises. Students write programs, write emails, find math logic errors... No multiple choice quizzes. Students get individual formative feedback from humans. Practical at scale, at low cost.

Students can fix and resubmit their work until they get it right. Supports mastery learning.

Pseudostudents (pseudents) are virtual students who go through the course with the real students. They help with deep learning and metacognition.

Patterns (schemas) system to help with deep learning.

SemiGUI editor. Uses Markdown (will switch to Textile), except that images and math formulas are shown in the editor, in place of file paths and TeX. Let's authors see what they're writing about.

Plus other stuff.

It's at http://cybercour.se.

Reactions welcome!

Kieran

Comments

distro critique; not

Posted by btopro on September 3, 2014 at 3:01am

distro critique; not discussing the tool, as we've agreed to disagree a bit on how we approach LMS creation.

-- Package on d.o.? If not there then github. currently doing both via ELMSLN, github to move fast, d.o. for SEO and permanence (https://github.com/btopro/elmsln vs https://drupal.org/project/mooc)
-- include patches in the projects that are patched (not in contrib directory)
-- simplify the install routine, installation profile is very complex which will drive you nuts maintaining long term
--"nbproject" folder is in the core project directory tree?

Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/

Thanks. I don't know what I'm

Posted by mathieso on September 3, 2014 at 2:21pm

Thanks. I don't know what I'm doing as far as distros go, and appreciate advice.

I want to put Cyco on DO, but don't know how yet. I've not worked with the community much, and know only a little about how projects are managed.

Any advice? For example, there are a bunch o' custom modules. Each in one project, or package as one in the distro? If that question even makes sense.

Cyco is already on GitHub. I use it for backup mainly. I don't know how the community features work.

Patches: makes sense, I'll do that.

Installation profile: how can it be simplified? It's mostly Features right now. What should it look like?

nbproject: duuuhhhh. That was silly. It's NetBeans metadata.

Re the LMS question. I'm not creating an LMS. You've done that already.

Cyco helps authors write skills textbooks. They're not textbooks, actually, but you can think of them as "textbooks plus."

Cyco helps authors help students. An example: metacognition. That's a belief about learning that helps/harms learning. For instance, "If you don't have the math gene, you'll never learn it." That belief about learning affects math achievement.

What in ELMS helps students get past metacognitive barriers?

Metacognition isn't on the LMS radar. ELMS, Moodle... it's not there.

This isn't a criticism. It's not what LMS do. I wouldn't expect you to know about metacognition. In the business school I teach in, I'm probably the only one of 70 faculty who's even heard the term.

Don't put Cyco in the LMS category. Cyco is in a different category. AFAIK, Cyco is the only thing in that category. That's a problem when explaining what Cyco is - there's nothing to compare it to.

You wrote about breaking ELMS into a cluster of different systems. That got me pretty excited. Cyco could be one element of that cluster. ELMS would not be an LMS, then. It would an LMS++, because the LMS concept does not include the things that Cyco does.

If you like, have a look at http://cybercour.se. It explains Cyco's goal. It's not what you think.

Sometime, I'd like to chat with you on the phone about ELMS and Cyco, their differences, and how they could help each other.

Thanks again. I appreciate any advice you can give. I have a lot to learn.

Kieran

Kieran Mathieson
kieran@dolfinity.com

Re Breaking down LMS:

Posted by btopro on September 16, 2014 at 3:05am

Re Breaking down LMS: absolutely. Hence my feedback on distro packaging ;)

If you look at the way profiler builder stamps out install profiles it's pretty basic as to what it's providing in the install profile / hook_install https://www.drupal.org/project/profiler_builder when you apply it to a site.

In the past I've made {projectname}_features as a repo that's stand alone and then another repo for the distro itself.

https://www.drupal.org/project/cis_connector and old school http://drupal.org/project/elms_features follow in this pattern. Don't have to do it that way, just a general BP.

Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/