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Common resources to all courses



  • 2004-07-16 22:17:06

    Common resources to all courses

    I'd like to have a stable welcome page that greeted everyone whether they are registered or not. A kind of shared recreation room.
    Ive created a course to do this and put it in a separate category named 1Welcome - so the 1 puts it at the topof the course list always. But how can I make it the default course that opens for everyone?
    [I did find a previous post about this but I'm sorry, I didnt understand the recommendation to do it with html on the login page. I'm fine with html but the login page action just calls login.php. I can then see in login.php that it's checking if the user's cookie records a course registration. But that's as far as I can get.
    I guess I'd need login,php to work undisturbed and do its checking but then regardless of results open the page for my Welcome course.

    Also I didnt realise the Glossary isn't common to all courses. Is there any way it can be a shared pool so all courses can click it in the side menu and access the same thing? This would avoid a lot of duplication and different topics would build up a varied mini encyclopaedia.


  • 2004-07-30 12:46:53

    Common glossary

    I would like to see a common glossary also. I was looking at the database schema and it would require a change in the glossary table. As it is designed now, the database is not normalized. It would be nice if the glossary table did not store the course_id and just had a glossary_id, term, and definition field and there was another table with course_id and glossary_id to store information about what glossary items belonged to what course. As it is now, if you use the same term in multiple courses it will be duplicated in the glossary table. Are there any plans to change this?


  • 2004-08-05 16:19:04

    Common glossary

    I strongly agree with the concept of a common glossary and any other change that promotes re-use of text, documents, data, etc.

    [reply][b]In reply to:[/b]
    I would like to see a common glossary also. I was looking at the database schema and it would require a change in the glossary table. As it is designed now, the database is not normalized. It would...
    [op]forums/view.php?fid=7;pid=2059;page=1#2192[/op][/reply]


  • 2004-08-06 17:11:04

    A dictionary maybe

    I see a glossary as relevant to the content being viewed. In a book for example, words in a glossary are found in that book.

    Perhaps you are thinking of a dictionary. A common glossary/dictionary, in addition to a course specific glossary, might be something that gets added in the future.

    Someone should add it to the feature requests forum. The more demand there is for a feature, the more likely it we (or someone else) might create it. Provide some detail how you thinking it should work.


  • 2004-08-06 17:23:19

    Glossary/dictionary

    The basic idea is that words/concepts are unlikely to be unique to a single course, so a central repository as a resource can provide lookups, uniformity, consistency, and even some savings to instructors.


  • 2004-08-07 10:33:39

    Still not convinced

    All definitions of a "glossary", according to dictionary.com, refer to specialized language within a particular area of knowledge. I would have to disagree on your statement "unlikely to be unique to a single course". While I'm certain there will be some words common across subjects, or across courses in the same subject area, a glossary is generally specific to a particular area of knowledge, and thus more appropriately applicable to a single course.

    See:
    http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=glossary

    If I were an instructor, and teaching a course in which, say 25 new terms were being introduced, I would not want those 25 terms mixed in with perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of terms not relevant to the subject I'm teaching. In some cases I'm sure that my definitions for terms as I'd like to teach my students to understand their meaning, will differ from others definitions. How might one deal with such variations in a glossary that spanned all courses? While there may be some benefit from being able to retrieve others defintions of terms, I would think that benefit would be limited, or even limiting in some cases where one did not like the definition available.

    You'll need to provide a more compelling argument....

    I still think you are talking about a more general dictionary collection of words, in which case sites like dictionary.com would be more useful than a common glossary, using links to dictionary terms like the one above.


  • 2004-08-07 10:52:31

    Yield

    I yield and plead no-contest. Clearly the concepts of sharing don't apply to the design or I've missed a fundamental specification in SCORM that provides the mandate for designing courses with potentially redundant materials.

    Good luck to all.


  • 2004-08-07 11:06:10

    SCORM?

    Not sure how SCORM applies in this situation.


  • 2004-08-09 11:39:19

    common glossary

    I do agree that terms will be unique for a particular course and I think that my suggestion to store terms in a common glossary, or dictionary if that is what you want to call it, and then have a separate table that relates a term to a specific course enables that uniqueness. By doing it that way, a term that is used in multiple courses is only entered into the dictionary one time and multiple definitions of a term are allowed. Some terms may be referenced by many courses and others by only one. It\'s all about normalization to reduce redundant storage in the database. In our application, all of our courses deal with a specific topic - high performance computing - and terms are shared by many of the courses. I would hate to have to enter the definition multiple times for each course.