Curriculum

Staffan Hansson (staffan@polyxena.net)


Table of Contents
1. The Big Picture
2. User's Guide
3. Administrator's Guide
4. Developer's Guide
5. Future Developments

This is the official documentation and user manual for the Curriculum module, which is used for online courses on OpenACS 4- and .LRN 1- websites. Curriculum's open source code was developed by Polyxena, Sweden, for the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg, Germany.

1. The Big Picture

The Curriculum module allows you to arrange URLs of suggested learning resources into a series of educational elements, a study path that the students are invited to follow. The URL elements that you set up to form your curriculum are presented in a curriculum bar (horizontal or vertical course menu) displayed on each page and in a view at the curriculum index page or in a .LRN portlet. A checkbox right next to each element link gets checked when the user has visited the URL. When all the educational elements in the curriculum bar have been checked the curriculum itself gets checked - the course is completed.

There can be one curriculum module instance per subsite, and each instance can have several curriculums published. Thus several curriculum bars may be displayed at a chosen position on each page. The teachers, assigned to a publishing workflow, administrate the curriculums and their elements. All students may restart a curriculum they are following or one that they have already finished. This means the elements for the curriculum in the student's personal bar get unchecked and that she has to take the course all over again. Thereby the student is given the opportunity to take a refresher course. Logged-in users will be able to drop curriculums, that is, they get to decide which of the published curriculums they want to take at any time.