Mailing List Archive: Trac: Users

Repurposing Trac for course management (?)

Index | Next | Previous | View Threaded

aaron.watters at gmail

May 7, 2008, 9:56 AM

Post #1 of 4 (55 views)
Permalink

Repurposing Trac for course management (?)

Hi folks. I'm interested in tools for online education
and it occurs to me that in many ways online courses
can be a bit like development projects.

Would it be feasible to set up Trac to support managing
assignments and deliverables between an instructor
and a group of students? Or maybe have a Trac
project for each student in class for managing that
student's work?

Here each assignment might
be a ticket and the deliverables would be accumulated
as ticket attachments -- or maybe you folks have better
ideas...

A key concern, of course, would be privacy and security
-- only the student and the instructor(s) should see the
deliverables and grading comments for that student, and
it would be great if there was a special field called "grade"
that could only be modified by the intructor... Also, a
university would probably like to manage usernames
and passwords centrally and stuff like that...

Sorry if this is crazy, if so just tell me I'm dumb and
I'll slink off into the shadows again...
Any thoughts?
-- Aaron Watters

===
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=wink
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Users" group.
To post to this group, send email to trac-users[at]googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to trac-users-unsubscribe[at]googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

yoheeb at gmail

May 7, 2008, 11:09 AM

Post #2 of 4 (46 views)
Permalink

Re: Repurposing Trac for course management (?) [In reply to]

On May 7, 11:56 am, Aaron Watters <aaron.watt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks. I'm interested in tools for online education
> and it occurs to me that in many ways online courses
> can be a bit like development projects.
>
> Would it be feasible to set up Trac to support managing
> assignments and deliverables between an instructor
> and a group of students? Or maybe have a Trac
> project for each student in class for managing that
> student's work?
>
> Here each assignment might
> be a ticket and the deliverables would be accumulated
> as ticket attachments -- or maybe you folks have better
> ideas...
>
> A key concern, of course, would be privacy and security
> -- only the student and the instructor(s) should see the
> deliverables and grading comments for that student, and
> it would be great if there was a special field called "grade"
> that could only be modified by the intructor... Also, a
> university would probably like to manage usernames
> and passwords centrally and stuff like that...
>
> Sorry if this is crazy, if so just tell me I'm dumb and
> I'll slink off into the shadows again...
> Any thoughts?
> -- Aaron Watters
>
I think this could be done. It would requires some coding for ticket
handlers, etc.

I am a relative noob, but here is what I would see as needing to be
done:
-Install a private Tickets plugin, so students could only see their
own tickets (there seem to be a couple that could do this, I haven't
used em)
-Add a custom field (or fields as needed) to tickets to have things
like: grade, due date (or maybe you use milestones for that for the
entire class?), etc.
-For your personal improvement, you might want to use the
TimingandEstimation plugin, so you could put in an estimate, and the
students could put in actual work time (totally optional)
-potentially: rather than attachment, use subversion for "submissions"
of class assignments. Not sure the nature of the courses, and it DOES
put the burden of requiring the students to create a working copy, no
big deal for CS classes etc., might be overkill for say, Literature
101. TortiseSVN is pretty easy to use. That said in real life I am
finding it nice to have version control on my day 2 day docs, so could
be a best practices prep for corporate life. Plus then you can have
them submit as they go and you could use the history of the files to
see their work progress (and struggles) again if they so choose to be
diligent.
- one way to give feedback on grades etc that is private, you might
just provide a SINGLE custom report that gives back data to the
current user only, or something like that.

I would suspect you might have to code some specialized hooks for SVN
if you use it, maybe even having a separate(read:private) branch for
each student. And maybe have to write some special ticket/workflow
handlers etc to really get exactly what you want, but it sure sounds
plausible. (and kinda cool, in a geeky way)

If you happen to find a way to get a private "journal" for each
student that is visible only to them and/or only editable by them,
that would be helpful as well, although ticket comments could be used
for that as well.

you also probably want the students to create "I need help" tickets,
kinda like virtual office hours. Not sure if you want those public or
not. (I would say yes, if everyone is having the same issue, then
you can address it singularly) Maybe an optional "private" field in
the ticket? I could see these things be extremely useful in make the
course better over time, as well as responding more quickly (or,
should I say, identifying) systemic flaws or assumptions in the
student bodies grasp of foundation concepts, and correctly early
rather than finding out at the final that nobody got "topic in week
one build on for the rest of the course" they way you expected.

That said, it could be quite a big task to get it in place, working,
and also working with/on your internal campus IT system.

Good luck.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Users" group.
To post to this group, send email to trac-users[at]googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to trac-users-unsubscribe[at]googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

kantrn at rpi

May 7, 2008, 12:00 PM

Post #3 of 4 (46 views)
Permalink

Re: Repurposing Trac for course management (?) [In reply to]

Aaron Watters wrote:
> Hi folks. I'm interested in tools for online education
> and it occurs to me that in many ways online courses
> can be a bit like development projects.
>
> Would it be feasible to set up Trac to support managing
> assignments and deliverables between an instructor
> and a group of students? Or maybe have a Trac
> project for each student in class for managing that
> student's work?
>
> Here each assignment might
> be a ticket and the deliverables would be accumulated
> as ticket attachments -- or maybe you folks have better
> ideas...
>
> A key concern, of course, would be privacy and security
> -- only the student and the instructor(s) should see the
> deliverables and grading comments for that student, and
> it would be great if there was a special field called "grade"
> that could only be modified by the intructor... Also, a
> university would probably like to manage usernames
> and passwords centrally and stuff like that...

You might want to check out
https://coderanger.net/browser/projects/trac/gradebook as a starting point.

--Noah

Attachments:

signature.asc (0.24 KB)

eirik.schwenke at nsd

May 8, 2008, 9:30 AM

Post #4 of 4 (38 views)
Permalink

Re: Repurposing Trac for course management (?) [In reply to]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

yoheeb[at]gmail.com skrev 07-05-2008 20:09:
| On May 7, 11:56 am, Aaron Watters <aaron.watt...@gmail.com> wrote:
|> Hi folks. I'm interested in tools for online education
|> and it occurs to me that in many ways online courses
|> can be a bit like development projects.
|>
|> Would it be feasible to set up Trac to support managing
|> assignments and deliverables between an instructor
|> and a group of students?

I'd say it all depends -- chiefly on security/privacy concerns, see below.

|> Or maybe have a Trac
|> project for each student in class for managing that
|> student's work?

As far as I can tell, this might be a better approach. It all depends on the
type of assignments etc -- but at least a personal trac for each student at a
course/university would hands down beat all kinds of e-learning tools I've had
the misfortune to be exposed to.

If there is enough resources in your project to realize this, it would have the
added potential benefit of merging personal student homepages, version control
and backup of data, with a nice way to trac assignments...

With an ldap backend it should be fairly simple to allow professors/teachers
access to all the students' tracs, and giving each student a personal trac/svn.

One might expand this to have project-level tracs for group assignments,
providing a few easy scripts to automate the setup of trac-installations.

(...)

|> A key concern, of course, would be privacy and security
|> -- only the student and the instructor(s) should see the
|> deliverables and grading comments for that student, and
|> it would be great if there was a special field called "grade"
|> that could only be modified by the intructor... Also, a
|> university would probably like to manage usernames
|> and passwords centrally and stuff like that...

I'd be very careful about this -- in my experience adding privacy to a system
designed for openness can be difficult in the extreme. Before even attempting
such a project be sure you've carefully modelled what privacy and security
demands you will have.

The classic problem is search indexinging and retrieval leaking sensitive
information.

(...)

| -potentially: rather than attachment, use subversion for "submissions"
| of class assignments. Not sure the nature of the courses, and it DOES
| put the burden of requiring the students to create a working copy, no
| big deal for CS classes etc., might be overkill for say, Literature
| 101. TortiseSVN is pretty easy to use.

With some effort, it would be possible to use svn with auto-versioning and
webdav, allowing less technical students to "ignore" the versioning aspect.

I'd say they'd miss out -- but it might be difficult to introduce a new system
(trac), a new way of thinking about versions (svn/mercurial) *and* forcing
people to use something like LyX for writing essays.

I'm sure the students would be *much* better off, than if they use
Word/Openoffice -- but it might be a though sell.

If you do get this approved, please let me know where you work, I might apply
for a masters exchange program there! :-)

(...)

| That said, it could be quite a big task to get it in place, working,
| and also working with/on your internal campus IT system.

Absolutely. If you force this through administration without talking it over
with IT, I suspect you'll have to do your own system administration, bugfixing
and software installs for the foreseeable future -- and you can probably forget
about hardware upgrades :-)

| Good luck.

Indeed, best of luck with your project.

As an aside, I think trac has great potential for use in schools and colleges,
and I think the community would benefit hugely down the road, both from English
lit majors (documentation) and the more obvious computer science graduates.

Best regards,

- --
~ .---. Eirik Schwenke <eirik.schwenke[at]nsd.uib.no>
( NSD ) Harald H�rfagresgate 29 Rom 150
~ '---' N-5007 Bergen tlf: (555) 889 13

~ GPG-key at pgp.mit.edu Id 0x8AA3392C
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFIIyqRxUW7FIqjOSwRAjxjAJ9fSx7x6ZAV05YHBSXnqalsBwadYACcCLr6
7omzsqDE9W7YllKL58/yMOc=
=Rtik
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Users" group.
To post to this group, send email to trac-users[at]googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to trac-users-unsubscribe[at]googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Index | Next | Previous | View Threaded

Interested in having your list archived? Contact lists@gossamer-threads.com