Question about School Server and student tracking

[John Watlington]

This is really a question to the activity developers/learning experience
folks, not server devel...

On Dec 29, 2007, at 10:01 AM, Bryan Berry wrote:

> Question for those working on the school server
>
> In Nepal we are looking at how to track students' academic progress as
> they workthrough our Squeak-based activities. I believe that Moodle  
> has
> a gradebook feature but I am not sure how we could integrate that w/
> Squeak.
>
> For the foreseeable future, learning activities for OLPC will probably
> be developed using a number of different toolsets such as Squeak,  
> Flash,
> Pygames,etc. I am curious how we can track students' progress across
> different learning activities implemented in different languages.
>
> We want to track just a few things such as whether the student  
> completed
> a given activity, how long they spent on it, and how they did on the
> activity such as unsatisfactory, satisfactory, excellent, and perfect.
> This information would help our developers measure how much progress
> kids make on our activities. For example, after X number of tries they
> get to the top level or after X tries they stay at the same level.

If this is for the developers, anonymous information is acceptable.
If it is used to track individual student's progress, it raises  
larger issues.

> Does anyone know if there a way to log a student's progress to Moodle
> through a web service call from w/in a Squeak, Python, or Flash-based
> activity? Is there a way to do this w/ the competing platform, Sakai?
>
> I have looked at Sakai only briefly and it seems that they have a more
> web-services oriented architecture than Moodle. Does anyone out in
> OLPC-Open-land have personal experience w/ Sakai?
> http://www.sakaiproject.org/media2/2006/overview/overview.htm

> I am sure we could build our own web service from scratch but I would
> much rather piggyback off of an established open-source community than
> start something ourselves.

There is not currently an OLPC recommended method for doing this.

> Related to this, has the school server team settled on using Moodle  
> for
> the School server?

Nothing has been settled.  Open source is required.
We've been concentrating our limited resources on basic operation,
but should have more resources becoming available in January.

> I will be in Boston for much of January and hope to meet w/ the  
> members
> of the server team based there.

Please let me know exactly what dates, so we can schedule something...

John