Charles Severance in Spain

Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) did a post on his trip to Spain on his blog (http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/). He was invited to speak at the LaSalle University’s F1rst Congress on Information and Communication Technology Managers. The title of his talk was “Open Source Learning Management Systems: Much More Than Free Source Code”. There also were a lot of discussions going on about different kinds of VLE’s.

Over there, MyCamTools got mentioned :

Then I mentioned the outstanding work of Cambridge University on MyCamTools as a move towards a more user-centered Sakai. I suggested that this would not make Sakai “user-centered” in my strictest definition – but it was a move toward meeting the needs of the student in a way that was useful to them.

During a Sakai Spain User Group meeting, MyCamTools got mentioned again and was shown to the people over there. Apparently, the things we have done addresses a lot of the needs of the Spanish Universities :

We talked about some transition issues from existing LMS systems – it was mostly about user-comfort issues when going from WebCT to Sakai. This is such a common problem and I wish we were better organized for this. I asked to get a list of the needs. Interestingly, many of the needs were actually usability and portal design – I showed them my Cam tools and everyone’s faces brightened up. Ian Boston might find MyCamTools in production in Spain before it is in production in Cambridge

Having someone else to run this in production would be great. It would mean more testing, more user feedback and thus very user centered improvements …

Flexible Dashboard Layout

Until now, the iGoogle like portal page has been limited to a standard 3 column layout, where every column is 33 % of the page-width. Our user feedback had learned us that some people would like this to be a little more flexible. For example, someone found that lecturers wouldn’t like choosing widgets and 3 columns would be too crowded for them. They might only want 1/2 columns with the MyCoursesAndProjects and the Recent Activity widgets and they wouldn’t like setting up a page like this. Another example was a student that wanted to add extra columns to his standard layout. Another remark was that if you hadn’t chosen a group and clicked Create Dashboard, you got prompted and when choosing a group then you lost your initial widget selection. So we tried to find a solution for all of these problems …

We changed the 1 step process into a 3 step process with a shortcut that allows you to do it in only 1 very short step. The only thing you need to do in the first screen is select your group/role in the university. If you don’t want to run through the entire setup process you can just click the Create Default Dashboard button. This will just create the default dashboard for your group (set in widgets.js). In this case, we removed the pain of selecting widgets you want on your portal page.

If you do want to go through the entire process, you can click the Next button. This will take you to screen 2 which is all about selecting your preferred layout. According to the group you selected, a preferred layout will be pre-selected. These layouts our all defined in widgets.js in this way :

layouts : {
twocolumn : {
name:”Two equal columns”,
widths:[50,50]
}, …

As you can see, you can define your own very random layouts and nothing is hard coded. The numbers in widths will be used to display a preview of the layouts and to construct the real portal page. 

The last step allows you to select the widgets you would like to have on your portal page.  According to the group you selected in step 1, a list of preferred widgets will be pre-selected. After having chosen all of the widgets you want, you can click the Create My Dashboard button. This will then save your settings and load a portal page with the selected layout and selected widgets.

Once you have your portal page set up, you can of course still change the widgets on it and the portal layout. We have kept this process as a 1 step screen. It now allows you to change your layout and add more widgets you don’t have yet.

All of this now has a lot more flexibility and starts getting close to a “Page builder” tool …