Data Flow Diagram of SyrCLE: Courseware and portfolio systems are usually designed as relational databases to allow a minimum of data duplication while giving users different roles and permissions to interact with their content and data. Students and faculty have expectations about how different tools should be used to organize data into familiar structures with implicit rules for interacting with the data in those tools. The design of these tools have not not allowed a lot of interplay between the tools. It is difficult to publish a portfolio that reuses classroom content (ie: assignments and discussion threads) that the student otherwise has access to view and manipulate in the limited manner the tool allows.
Furthermore, if a student enrolls in another institution or another class that doesn't use the same instance of the courseware, the data from the different classes can not be combined to create new content.
What is needed is a student centered content management system that serves as the student's virtual backpack and their main platform for lifelong learning. The interface between their content management system and the classroom management tools deployed in a LMS has not yet been designed.
This data flow diagram is intended to describe the flow of information into, out of and within a distributed, networked LMS that has two main components: course content and student content management tools.
A couple days ago I shared some "reconceptualizing" Sakai and OSP based on some feedback from a couple of our faculty and the problems that Dr. Joseph Shedd (our PI) has shared in our meetings between Weber/UMich/Portland/Virginia Tech.
