Development:e-learningforkids.org
This document is a very quick specification for a re-implementation of e-learningforkids.org using a database and web services, to help them create something that Moodle and similar systems can connect to.
Currently the web site is a set of manually-created web pages and has no database and no services.
Database
All the pages under http://e-learningforkids.org/courses.html should be generated from data in a database table.
Advantages:
- Easy to add new courses
- Consistent appearance across pages with minimal maintenance
- Can provide a search functionality
- Same data for web site can be used to provide web services, or to generate a CD-ROM version with a customised look and feel, and so on.
This describes a very simple design. A fully normalised design might put authors, licenses, categories, languages, views and other fields into separate tables and just include references between them.
'course' table
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| id | int | Auto-incrementing courseid |
| coursename | varchar | Full name of the course |
| codename | varchar | A short codename for the course, such as M0601 |
| authors | varchar | Name of the authoring team etc |
| license | varchar | License name of the course content (eg Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) |
| timeadded | int | The time/date that the course was added |
| timeupdated | int | The last time/date that the course was updated |
| language | varchar | The language of the course (eg en, es, fr, pt, zh, etc) |
| category | varchar | A simple name for the category this course belongs to (eg math, science, computer, language, health etc). The script displaying the page would convert this to something in the appropriate language. |
| topic | varchar | A very short description of the content, just a few words. |
| summary | text | A one-sentence description of the content |
| description | text | A full description of the content, could be pages including teacher's instructions etc |
| minage | int | A minimum age that this resource is aimed at |
| maxage | int | A maximum age that this resource is aimed at |
| views | int | A count of all the views this course has had |
Screenshots do not need to be stored in this table, as they can always be in the same place on the server, using the unique codename (eg http://e-learningforkids.org/screenshots/M0601-en.jpg)
Same for the actual link to the course, these can be stored on the server disk in standard locations like http://e-learningforkids.org/courses/M0601-en/index.html
Data entry
To make data entry easier, you'll need scripts to browse, add and update entries in the database. The forms should allow an authenticated user (admin) to add new entries, upload screenshots and date etc.
To make the authentication easier, a CMS like Drupal could be used as the framework for the web site.
The scripts should employ strong security practices to make sure input data is sanitised before it comes in contact with program language or databases.
Web site display
The pages on the web site should be generated using a scripting language like PHP. These scripts call the database for information and build the pages as required.
This could be called http://e-learningforkids.org/courses/index.php and take several parameters such as 'search', 'lang', or 'category' to display different subsets of the database.
The pages should be valid XHTML Strict or HTML 5.
The scripts should employ strong security practices to make sure input data is sanitised before it comes in contact with program language or databases.
Web services
Web service REST scripts could be called similarly to the web display scripts and would return the data structured as XML.
http://e-learningforkids.org/rest.php
might return a list of categories, while
http://e-learningforkids.org/rest.php?category=math
would return a list of just the math courses, and
http://e-learningforkids.org/rest.php?category=math&minage=5&maxage=10&search=turtle
would return all the math courses for users between 5 and 10 that contain the word "turtle".
The script should employ strong security practices to make sure input data is sanitised before it comes in contact with program language or databases.
