The Living Schoolbook

Course Management Systems often enable central administration of classes from a technical perspective.  However, faculty and students tend to remain isolated from the program in which the class takes place.  IT systems seem to perpetuate the traditional “closed door” classroom.

There is increasing demand for a “goal oriented” view of student progress toward institutional, program and personal outcomes for the purposes of curriculum mapping, program level assessment and student advising.  While portfolio software has been frequently deployed to gather data for student assessment it often fails to address the bulk of student activity in their coursework.

The Living SchoolBook is involved in an effort to design and develop a suite of courseware and portfolio tools built on top of the Sakai framework that will address this gap and play a significant role in the School of Education's Assessment System.  Syracuse University’s School of Education plans to deploy a suite of “Goal Aware Tools" to meet accreditation requirements.  We presented this idea during the Sakai/OSP conference in Austin in December 2005 (here is an annotated version of that presentation), again in Vancouver in June 2006, Atlanta in Dec 2006 and Amsterdam in June 2007.

On February 22, 2006 the alpha testing kickoff was held. The attached document was distributed to introduce:

• the process for using these tools
• the testing procedures
• the timeline for testing
• definitions of key phrases

Alpha testing was a success. A few small issues were handled and we now have a beta test in progress for the remainder of the Spring '06 semester. We have also made available another instance of Sakai and a few flash animations that illustrate the planned use of these tools.