Kick off of roadmap discussion

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hello All,

I've started a new category here for all those parties interested in the Liferay University project.

Please feel free to chim in and give your support. Whether this is through comments or development doesn't matter as I'll appreciate both.

The first topic is of course the roadmap that has up until now remained void.

Ray

PS: I'm going to generally keep my thoughts about Liferay University here so that you might comment on them.

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

There are currently two Issues open in the support site related to implementation of some University functionality.

- Calendar based availability of content items (portlets and layouts/pages)
http://support.liferay.com/browse/LEP-1265

- Community templates
http://support.liferay.com/browse/LEP-1266

The descriptions of each are fairly informative. Comments?

Also, I've outlined some requirements of what I think we need as far as a Quiz type portlet is concerned.

[see next thread: Quiz Portlet]

Other issues that need to be addressed are
- User tracking/reporting/statistics.
- SCORM

Any other points that need to be added to the roadmap?

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 17 años.]

I would also like to help at least with ideas. I've been applying Liferay to educational contexts for the last three years so I hope some of what I've seen and learned could help.

- Calendar based availability of content items (portlets and layouts/pages)
http://support.liferay.com/browse/LEP-1265
- Community templates
http://support.liferay.com/browse/LEP-1266

I've added some comments to each of them

Other issues that need to be addressed are
- User tracking/reporting/statistics.
- SCORM

Germinus has a team working on a project that includes adding this two features on top of Liferay. The current plan is to have the functionalities related to SCORM in production by December on top of Liferay 3.5. Afterwards the functionalities related to the User tracking and reporting will be developed on top of Liferay 4.

All the functionalities related to SCORM have been implemented on top of Germinus' own content management system, called Scribe, which is being incubated in Liferay's subversion repository under MIT license. Some features that are currently supported are:

• Support for structured contents. For each content type a wizard to create and edit content instances are created
• Support for several content catalogs: each user has their own + there is one for each community
• Organization of catalogs in content folders
• Support for sending contents from one catalog to other
  - Standard: the administrators of the target catalog must approve the content
  - Student backpack: teachers are allowed to send their students contents to a special folder of their personal content catalog called backpack. This content will need no approval.
• Support for special editors for complex content types:
  - Glossary editor (will soon include reusing definitions from other glossaries)
  - SCORM content authoring and editing: support creating HTML content and it's organization.
• Possibility of importing SCORM contents
• Possibility of exporting any content type to SCORM (work in progress)
• Edition of IMS Metadata by integrating Reload Editor (work in progress)
• Content search based on SCORM metadata (work in progress)
• Publishing any of this contents through a set of publishing portlets which allow either manual selection of contents or automatic selection based on preconfigured filters.
• Support for backups of individual contents

This functionality has been implemented on top of JSR-170, using Jackrabbit as the implementation. It has been implemented as two portlet WARs. It's main drawback is that it doesn't work yet on top of Liferay 4 and that it hasn't been translated to english yet (shouldn't be hard).

Liferay University shares several goals with the current Scribe direction and they have several interesting features already implemented so we could explore the possibilities of working together with the Scribe team. What do you think?

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Jorge Ferrer:

All the functionalities related to SCORM have been implemented on top of Germinus' own content management system, called Scribe

With that said, and let's agree that SCORM is important, what do you think is the best approach to implementing SCORM in Liferay?

Do we further incubate scribe, to eventually make it a standard feature in the portal?

Provide it as an optional extension, which in turn provides access to SCORM features?

I'd be a little leary of making our (likely) SCORM integration available only as a function of another optional extension. I'm thinking that it would be more suitable to have SCORM _quitely_ integrated directly into the portal so that other aspects like creating archives of content and data, SCORM object->portal communication, external SCORM content creation tools, can be made to work with the SCORM framework.

What is your view on this?

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 17 años.]

As to how is scribe going to be adopted within Liferay it's hard to tell right now. We should probably start some evaluation process and make a decission out of it.

If we decide to ship it with Liferay then we'll have SCORM support out of the box, and we don't have to implement it ourselves. If we decide to ship it as an extension we'll have to decide wether it's worth the effort of reimplementing it or not.

IMHO, the next step should be to try Scribe yourself to have your own opinion. Let's see if it is possible to make it work on Liferay 4 the next following days. If it is not I think it's good enough to try it out on Liferay 3.6 in order to evaluate it. What do you think?

[Alvaro Gonzalez, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi, I am Alvaro Gonzalez, lead developer of Scribe. We are trying to integrate Scribe with Liferay 4, but we are having problems with StrutsPortlets in portlets War.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to show Scribe to you in Xpression (our extension of Liferay 3.5), until we solve the problems.
Our main targets now with Scribe are:
- Wide SCORM support.
- Improve JCR repository access performance.
- Although Scribe is I18N ready we need to translate all the keys into english.
- Generate technical documentation in english.

We are very enthusiastic about Liferay University, and we hope we can collaborate widely in the project.

Regards,
Álvaro

[Bill Kudrle, modificado hace 17 años.]

I am interested also in Liferay university, but could not find any information about Scribe. Does anyone have a link?

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Scribe is a CMS designed and implemented by Germinus, Madrid Spain. It was integrated into Liferay by them and is used in production by their clients. It was recently released to open source and is being incubated in Liferay's SVN repository. Currently it's not operational on a stock Liferay, but this is being aggresively worked on by the Germinus team.

Also there aren't any public docs on it yet.

One of the big features that Scribe brings is a complete (FWICT) implementation of the SCORM APIs.

Jorge Ferrer was a key developer at Germinus, and could give a much better description/explanation. He may even correct me if I've not explained it quite accuratly.

Jorge?

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hello Alvaro,

I'd very much like to see Xpression in operation. If you could setup a demo, that would be very much appreciated.

[Alvaro Gonzalez, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi all. Sorry for the delay, but i was on holidays last week. At last we managed to integrate Scribe with Liferay 4, and even though we still have some little problems, we will try to set it up for a demo soon.

Regards,
Alvaro

[atul patel, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi all.

I have a fair amount of experience with learning management systems. I'm new to liferay and very excited that this functionality being added.

Is there a published road map anywhere?

Is there a feature list for scribe published anywhere?

Liferay already seems to have many of the needed features and with the addition of a couple more and some wrapping it is very doable. With liferay being such a flexible platform, there is a need for template based setups to configure liferay for common business practices -- ie LMS would automatically generate a community with a number of pages with portlets to achieve that function.

From the various posts it sounds like much more than what I'm suggesting below is already done.

The most basic LMS functionality would be:
import of course
course catalog
assigning courses to users
launching/basic tracking of a single unit course -- SCORM allows for very detailed tracking within courses. As a starting point, perhaps just the launch, progress, basic bookmarking (per location field) , and lesson status.
basic reporting

I'd also like to start a training project. How great would it be to include Liferay self-paced training from within Liferay itself?

Any suggestions on how to move forward and/or who I should talk to?

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hello atul,

We don't have a roadmap yet. This is where we hope to develop it. I'm currently finishing up a project (not related to LMS), so haven't been working on this for a while.

Over the month of December, I'm hoping to make a big push on LMS features.

I think that we should prioritize what is to be done, and even delegate certain tasks to those who would be willing to undertake them.

1. "Course" definition; do we make a distinction between a regular community and a "Course". I'm wondering if you all think there should be a special path for creating Courses which is different than for a standard community. If so, let's define the difference. Let's debate this one.

2. We definitely need to have import/export of "Courses". To this end, we created a framework for exporting portlet data. This functionality is currently restricted due to some problems with the object model. These need to be resolved soon.

3. "Course" Templates. I'm hoping to leverage the same mechanism for import/export to create the Template mechanism.

4. "Course" Versions. Same framework.

5. Currently, in order to manage the import of communities via the LAR file, you have to be outside of the community. This needs to be addressed so that an instructor or course designer can perform the import/export from within the "Course"/community. I'm thinking of adding a third layout tree (currently we have PUB/PRI) called CFG, where we place the community/course configuration portlets which is ignored for the purpose of import/export. This is also a requirement for the ASP/virtual hosting side of portal usage.

5. I like the "Course Catalog" idea.

6. Assessment/forms design. My thought here was to design a tool which could be used inside or outside of the LMS as a means for creating public submission forms, surveys, quizzes, etc. It would be great to implement a very feature rich form design and processing engine, which could have various aspects and target project types:

- e.g. Target Project Types
- Online Quiz (this would be used in course)
- Survey (Course or otherwise)
- Public form (data tracked by IP instead of by userId?), signup forms, email forms, feedback forms, etc...

- e.g. Aspects
- Data collection
- Data analysis/statistics
- Data submission to external systems (forward submission to a webservice, or to an external GET/POST action)
- Event handling (e.g. send email on submit, to creator/submitter)
- Levels of design difficulty; basic, intermediate, advanced.

If we could leverage an existing framework such as the Orbeon OPS xforms implementation, it would be great.

7. There are various other portlets we'd like to build. Please name them if I haven't:
- Notes
- User tracking
- Glossary
- etc...

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

One concern I have is with SCORM.

How should we tackle this? Scribe implements SCORM, but if we build additional portlets, or extend the portal with LMS features does Scribe provide us with a means to smoothly bridge them with SCORM?

Perhaps Alvaro, could describe this for us. Alvaro, do you know when Scribe will be compatible with 4.2.x?

[Russ Danner, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi Ray,

Do we have anything in the wiki for this? Maybe in the proposed projects section?

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 17 años.]

Ray Auge:

One concern I have is with SCORM.

How should we tackle this? Scribe implements SCORM, but if we build additional portlets, or extend the portal with LMS features does Scribe provide us with a means to smoothly bridge them with SCORM?

Perhaps Alvaro, could describe this for us. Alvaro, do you know when Scribe will be compatible with 4.2.x?

Hi Ray,

The support that scribe provides for SCORM is to add a layer on top of JCR to allow storing and searching scorm contents. It also provides some portlets to create SCORM contents.

Scribe is modularized so Liferay can just use the core API to create our own portlets. That would give us the most flexibility. Also, I think that the core part already works with Liferay 4.2 Probably there are some missing stuff related to the new permission system, but we can help them with that.

[atul patel, modificado hace 17 años.]

Sorry all. I've been away for awhile and not monitoring the forums. (Does this forum send emails when new posts come in?) Forgive me as I am new to liferay and that what I am describing may not be the best solution for this platform.

I hadn't considered the notion of a course being a repurposed community page... Interesting concept. I can see how one would arrive to that solution to quickly produce courseware / content.

I would suggest that a series of new objects be created to support course/training world while using the existing portlets as content for a course. This would probably create the most flexibility and allow for external content to be tracked as a course as well. We should try and use the SCORM specification for managing learning objects as much as possible (why reinvent the wheel)

We should definately add SCORM and AICC support. Here are some examples of classes / objects we should add. Ive broken the objects into 2 versions. Version 1.0 represents the minimum needed to launch and track a course. Version 1.2 adds skills / competency management to the mix. Ideally we would want to have the version 1.2 items in place from the beginning to prevent migration issues later. Let me know your thoughts. Should we roll it all up into a Version 1.0?

Version 1.0
Enrollment (record assocating a course with a user)
Catalog (record organizing a group of courses (this catalog could be permision, by org, community, etc)
Course (title, description, url, tracking type (scorm, aicc, access only, not tracked, classroom)
CourseTrackingModule(handles state changes, bookmarking etc)

Version 1.2
Skills
Assessments
Competencies
Retraining Rules
Learning Objectives

I believe some of these classes can be extensions to existing code and/or classes but am not familiar enough to make that mapping.

SCORM courses tend to be delivered as packaged content and are suppose to be transportable between learning management systems. This is where we will run into issues with portability. This isn't an issue that liferay is alone in. The quiz and testing funcationality is highly sought after, needs to be easy to use, but solutions tend to be learning management server dependent. I think sacrificing portability for effective training is acceptable and let the user decide if they want portability. If so, they can develop the quiz functionality externally to liferay and liferay would render the quiz just like any other content. Please note there may be a mechanism in SCORM that would allow the content to reside external to the package -- I'm not an expert (yet) on SCORM but will hopefully fill this knowledge gap soon.

Would it be possible to setup a conference call to discuss? I'm leaving at the end of the week and would love to help make some progress if possible. I'll be out of country for a couple of months but "should" have some internet access. I heard there is internet access in the village/town I'm going to visit.

If anyone has some questions about courses/scorm/aicc, I would be more than happy to answer what I can.

I'd also like to hear from the community what demand there is for this functionality. Comments? Do you think we have enough information to make a road map / move to publish a requirements doc?

Cheers,

--Atul

[Sandeep Nair, modificado hace 13 años.]

I know this is a dead horse right now but any idea how to integrete Scorm 1.2 compliant module in liferay

[Jari Järvelä, modificado hace 12 años.]

Hi,

we are currently working with a SCORM player portlet and we will release the source code shortly in GitHub (https://github.com/arcusys). Currently the portlet "plays" SCORM content without exchanging any information with the Liferay. The portlet in current development phase supports SCORM 2004.

We aim to develop a quiz portlet as well to support Liferay use as a learning environment. Our aim is not to develop a Liferay LMS, instead the idea is to develop open and social learning environments and opportunities using Liferay. I am personally very convinced that Liferay witholds a huge potential as an online learning tool.

I started a Twitter profile sharing my insights and activities regarding development of Liferay as a online learning tool. The address of the Twitter profile: www.twitter.com/jarijarvela.

Best regards,

Jari

[Sandeep Nair, modificado hace 12 años.]

That is an awesome contribution. Will it be released under MIT license?

Regards,
Sandeep

[Janne Hietala, modificado hace 12 años.]

It has been released!

Br,
Janne

[Dave Finch, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi,

I'm wondering if you all think there should be a special path for creating Courses which is different than for a standard community

One idea i had for the presentation of courses was to use a new type of layout. we currently have portlet, URL, Article etc. we could have a new - type 'Course'.

i have implemented an LMS within liferay 3.6 (we didn't need to support SCORM) and we just created a new navigation portlet which overlaid the tree nodes with icons to indicate the learner's status of each page. this portlet was then place on every page that formed part of a course along with either a journal content portlet, a test portlet or any other portlet.
The advantages of this approach were:
1. the ability to use any portlet within a course.
2. reuse of lifeary page admin.
3. reuse of journal content etc.
The disadvantages were - in hind sight:
2. the distinction between course content and other content in the portal was not always clear.
2. tracking progress of a user was a bit messy (we had a tracking portlet on each page).

i think that a new layout type along with a course authoring tool that that allows courses to make use of portlets (maybe through velocity templates) would give all the benefits and address the disadvantages.

this approach may impact on SCORM compliance but I think that the advantage of supporting SCORM is that people can import courses, i feel that most people that author courses will be doing so for their own use and providing additional functionality would benefit these people, anyone wishing to keep their own courses SCORM compliant could avoid using the 'advanced' features.

I would be interested what everybody things about this...

Dave

[Dave Finch, modificado hace 17 años.]

Hi Ray,

I think Liferay University is a great idea. I am ready and willing to lend a hand.

I guess the first item on the roadmap will be to gather and discuss requirements. I am sure that a lot of people will have some interesting ideas.

My idea is that University will take the form of a collection of portlets.

Another hot topic is likely to be the industry standards to adhere to, SCORM for example. Personally I am in favor of supporting SCORM for the purpose of importing and exporting courses providing it does not inhibit the demanded level of functionality in the front end.

Can’t wait to get started.

Dave

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Dave Finch:

Hi Ray,

I think Liferay University is a great idea. I am ready and willing to lend a hand.

Great

Dave Finch:

I guess the first item on the roadmap will be to gather and discuss requirements. I am sure that a lot of people will have some interesting ideas.

My idea is that University will take the form of a collection of portlets.

I agree. As you've done in your implementation we want to simply add more functionality via portlets. The idea is that Liferay will be able to fullfill multiple roles within an organization/institution.

Currently, I know of no LMS that adequatly supports this type of deployment, though some try to...
e.g.
- School portal
- LMS environment
- Collaborative work environment
- Webmail system
- Document Management
- etc...

I think that Liferay fits into this space.

Dave Finch:

Another hot topic is likely to be the industry standards to adhere to, SCORM for example. Personally I am in favor of supporting SCORM for the purpose of importing and exporting courses providing it does not inhibit the demanded level of functionality in the front end.

Definitely SCORM.

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

Want to mention that we might want to look at what has been done on projects such as Sakai.

http://sakaiproject.org/

They have, among other things, SCORM portlets developed under the OSI approved Educational Community License.

[Russ Danner, modificado hace 17 años.]

Can we start putting this stuff in the Wiki? We have portal Roadmap, a community roadmap and a portlets roadmap. LM is not a core portal concern so it probably doesnt belong on the portal road map and it will likely (hopefully) involve lots of great portlets and all kinds of other goodies. Why dont we create a projects roadmap and under that create an LM poject with its own roadmap. On the portlets roadmap we can just link to the LM pages that relate to portlets

[Ray Auge, modificado hace 17 años.]

I agree that we could put some of this on the wiki. I also agree that University shouldn't fall under the portal roadmap.

Jorge and I have started re-organizing the wiki in an effort to make it more useful. Please feel free to contribute.