Student projects/Blog improvements

Note: This page outlines ideas for the Blog Improvement / Blog Assignment Type project. It's a specification under construction! If you have any comments or suggestions, please add them to the page comments.

Summary

This project aims to make improvements to the existing blog component and add a blog assignment module. Blogs can help immensely in keeping a student's work and an instructor's supervision coordinated, especially in self and group-directed projects or long-term assignments. The blog assignment module will make it easier for instructors to take advantage of the existing blog component.

The improvements to the blog will be a new system of relating course entities to blog posts. Assignments, group projects, and courses can all be associated with blog posts, providing a method of filtering a blog at each level and thus avoiding the need to search through a blog for relevant posts from a student enrolled in multiple classes. These relations also provide a means of access control for group projects and the notion of a group blog. A group project may pertain to several students, and blog posts from each student related to the project can be filtered out of each of their blogs and combined on a single view. Specific blogging assignments can also be associated with blog posts so the instructor is aware of which posts the student wishes to have considered for evaluation.

Mentor: Mathieu Petit-Clair

Student: Joey Morwick

Milestones in the Project

• Develop and finalize complete plans for updating the blog component and for the assignment module
• Implement course associations in the blog component including privacy and organizational support
• Create the blog assignment module with assignment associations implemented in both the module and the blog component
• Implement project management for teachers and project assocations
• Implement backup support for courses with blog entries associated with them or with contained assignments and projects.
• Final bug-checking and refactoring

Interface Mockups

The interface for adding associations to a blog entry would appear under the tag portion of the form. Javascript will populate relevant assignment and project entries for selected courses, whereas when javascript is unavailable, all project and assignment entries will be present with the associated course prepended to the name of the project/assignment. Relevant course and project associations are automatically added on the server-side for associated assignments whether javascript is enabled or not.

Associations will appear with icons under the tags portion of a posted blog entry. Each links to a list of blog entries associated with the course/project/assignment selected just as they are when a tag link is visited.

See also

• GSOC/2008