This is a proof of concept of the Instruction Designer. As you can see, you will use the jQuery UI datepicker package to select the start and end date of the course. This will automatically generate another datepicker calendar in the right most collumn that has the range of months displayed. This project also uses the outline designer module for the left most collumn so that you can access any structured content you want.
The center collumn (not yet finished) will have an interface similar to the outline designer that allows you to structure content into menu navigation. You will be able to either add containers inline, mass generate them via some type of high level structure, or drag content from the outline designer into the menu structure as references. Once this information is in the center collumn you'll be able to associate time durations to it. This will help you figure out if you are allocating enough time to lessons / units / modules of instruction to fill the course through the end date. When you set a duration you will also be able to associate a color to the organizing container. The duration of all sub-elements will then be totaled up to give the duration of that container and the color association will be displayed visually on the calendar on the right. This will serve two purposes: to help plan the delivery of matierals during the creation of the course and also to provide a way for students to visually see their progress throughout the semester.
Once our POC is more finalized and the code for the center collumn flushed out, this interface will drop into a syllabus so that the duration, dates, and other information can be automatically generated into tables, outlines, and exportable / flat html pages. One last note about the ways in which you can add materials to the center collumn. I mentioned mass generation of high level structures, here's a short walkthrough as to how we envision that functioning:
- You have fed the system your start and end date
- Option 1:
- You want to break your course down and organize it by weeks of instruction
- You select to auto generate weeks, it calculates the number of weeks and generates (for example) Week 1 - Week 15
- Option 2:
- You have a standard naming convention and a set number of groupings you want to use (for example 7 Modules of instruction)
- You feed it the name of the groupings (Module) and the number of groups (7) and it generates Module 1 - Module 7
These are just two of the conventions that we've come up with though I'm sure there are a lot of other ones. We will be looking to use this in conjunction with (required for some, not all though) the following projects if you want to check any of them out:
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