Subject: RE: LMS user models From: "John Yin" Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 12:58:42 -0700 To: "Geoffrey Fox" CC: "Alex Ho" Current Draft. The part to focus on is the instructor UI model because I think that is better than student model currently and it would be nice to have consistency. So the student model would be a toned down version of the instructor model. Several bigger design decisions that were made: ----------------------------------------------------------- * Action based model UI versus Object based model UI. Decided to go with Object based model UI with context sensitive action buttons. I think there are too many common actions and the organization is user flow is not very clear for that. * Tree based navigation or Web based navigation So this is to see whether we should expose the Course structure completely as a tree and allow the user to expand/collapse tree nodes or to take the web based tree navigation model where you can only see contents of the current node and have to go deeper to see each node's content & actions. I took a web based navigation approach because I think although tree is clean and all encompassing, it is not intuitive to the ordinary user. * Enforced course hierarchy or custom course hierarchy The decision here is whether to allow the instructor to add any type of material/content at any level of of the tree (which the architecture allows) or to enforce a common course hierarchy. In the end, I think to start with an enforced hierarchy and then add "advanced" options to allow customizations later. If the instructor is allowed to create their own course hierarchy, I think it will become confusing for students as there is no consistency across courses. Of course the underlying architecture is tree based and completely generic. Please comment on what your ideal LMS user model would be. Remaining --------------- * Course Material creation/editing model - Currently will design a folder based model like windows folder navigation. You can add any content in any folder. * Course creation/editing model - A wizard model that takes you through several most commonly entered data screens. John -----Original Message----- From: alex ho [mailto:alexho@anabas.com] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 2:58 AM To: geoffrey fox Cc: johnyin@anabas.com; alexho@anabas.com Subject: LMS user models we are working on user models for LMS. if you have convenient way to look at some powerpoint in Italy (28.8k modem may take a long time to download though) please tell us what you think. if not you could give us input when you get back. thanks. i probably should ask cmu to give us a guest account to their system.