Education Subsystem

part of the ArsDigita Community System by Randy Graebner and Aileen Tang
Note: This module and documentation are not yet complete. We are releasing it so that people may know what is currently available and what is coming. We hope to be making significant improvements to this module over the next several incremental releases. We encourage all forms of feedback. If there are any features that are not currently in the system but you would like to see, please feel free to request them.
This module implements all the IT needs for a department or university to organize and administer all of its classes online. Most importantly, it is tightly integrated with the rest of the ArsDigita Community System. This enables the site administrator to run a single Oracle query to "find all users who have taken classes A, B, and C", then spam them asking if anyone wants to TA a new course. Or, they can say "find all students in danger of failing a class", then notify them of the situation.

In addition to the standard bulletin board and chat room you would expect in any online educational system, this provides administrators with the ability to see all information about any student or any group of students at any given time. The system provides online homework submission and grading, automated grade calculation, and the ability to easily monitor students' performance and participation. In addition, it enables instructors to create and manage course Web sites without having to know HTML or other programming languages.

The system provides the student with the ability to view all of their classes and assignments on an integrated schedule. In addition, it allows students to easily build a portfolio of their work across classes. Students can customize their calendars and work space using extra tables for the portal system.

Department administrators can collect statistics about classes they are offering as well as view information about the students taking those classes.

The education moudle offers these featurs in addition to many other features detailed in the overview below.

  1. Feature-by-feature overview
  2. Setting up your university
  3. Operation of your university
  4. Technical details (for now, you can view the data model)

randyg@arsdigita.com, aileen@mit.edu