[zope] Digest Number 1357

[Lee]

Hi Henny,

I've just finished my final year university project, which aimed to investigate the use of Zope in educational insitutions and create a useful product. I study at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and from what I gather, there are some people here that are quite keen to see Zope deployed.

Info: http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/~duncan/teaching/projects/zeus.html

My project was called ZAPHOD and is primarily for maintaining class details & student attendance/academic records - but it has some other functionality too. One of my fellow students undertook a similar project, called ZEALOUS, which had similar goals but his product was a Web course development tool allowing lecturers to maintain a class Web page, and provide student with tailoired personal homepages. If you are looking for any more information

feel free to ask. I'm pretty sure that my project supervisor, Duncan Smeed, would be quite entertaining if you had any questions relating to Zope's future at the University of Strathclyde.

I know of two other major projects already fully(?) developed and employed in the UK. Here are some notes I took a while back (including some URLs and universities where Zope is used...

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ASPIRE
[http://medico.uwcm.ac.uk/media/lt/projects/aspire/default.htm]

ASPIRE is a Web-based authoring and tutorial environment, which is being developed at the University of Wales' College of Medicine by the Learning Technology section. It was originally developed using PHP3 and is now being migrated to Zope. ASPIRE provides a number of tools to facilitate Web page creation containing HTML, interactive questions, images, etc. These web pages will form the basis for an interactive quiz, where students will proceed
through a sequence of pages containing multiple choice, or text entry questions.

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NLE / TLTP3-86
[http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/nle]
[http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nle/about/]

The TLTP3-86 project is being developed in collaboration with representatives from the Universities of Newcastle, Durham, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Northumbria. It aims to disseminate IT based approaches developed to facilitate and support the interactive learning of medical and health care science students based in sites remote from the university campuses

The NLE is not a product but a process by which institutions can implement on-line learning support tools in their own context [NLE 1998]. The project is funded by the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TTLP) and is being developed as part of the TLTP3-86 project.

NLE systems have 3 major components - Mediguides, Personal Academic Records (PARs) and SATURN.

MediGuides - A MediGuide is a learning resource containing study guides, links to course material (e.g. Word documents), online multiple-choice questionnaires, timetable information and other forms of CAL (Computer-Aided Learning) resources. For every course taught there is a corresponding MediGuide.

Personal Academic Record (PAR) - Personal Academic Records will improve student / teacher communication and will encourage students to monitor their academic progress. Each MediGuide will contain self-evaluation tests and a student / teachers email system to facilitate this. The student's assessment data will be stored in the PAR and made available for viewing by both the student and the teacher.

SATURN - The SATURN system is responsible for storing the student's personal data, examination marks and any other relevant administrative data. The system will primarily be used by the faculty offices to distribute documents to the students throughout the course.

Hope that help you out. If you've got any question on ZAPHOD or ZEALOUS I'd be happy to answer them. I can provide you with a few screen shots too if you wish.

Is there anywhere I can read / see your system? I'm quite interested to see how it operates.

Cheers,

Lee

--
Lee Reilly
mailto:lee.reilly@ntlworld.com
http://www.footkick.co.uk/lee

Henny van der Linde wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We (a smal group) have build a quite comprehensive (but still far from perfect in our opinion) Zope based system  in wich teachers can offer websupport with their courses. It's a sort of content management system for teachers. Students can also deliver content. There are groupware fascilites and more. This is all realized in a rather large social sciences faculty within a dutch university. We have a relative large, happy, userbase but.......
>
> It has been quite a struggle. Not the development sec but 'selling' Zope as a platform and facing competitors in the ,so called weblearning world. Now we're facing a battle with Blackboard (I'm just recovering from an attack by some idiots who want to rebuild the whole thing with PHP, Dutch universities: never a dull moment.....).
>
> What realy would help us (in defending our system and Zope) is a list universities, schools etc. who are using Zope for educational/scientific/content management purposes. I'm monitoring/contributing  to (not as much as some of you I'm afraid)  this list and I noticed that quite some activity on the Zope front is happening in academic/scientefic/educational environments but I never kept any taps.
>
> So if you are using Zope in this sort of environment please let me know. You can mail me direct: linde@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. If I have a list I put it on Zope.org so that other people can use to defend their (potential) Zope efforts to decisionmakers, a sort of academic/educational showcase.
>
> Henny van der Linde
>
> [This message contained attachments]