Re: developing an educational Plone distribution

Hi,

I very much like the discussions about eLearing, but I made this post in 
the very beginning of this thread and I want to reassert it again so 
that we don't forget that educational needs are quite widespread : I 
still think it would be worthwhile to provide research groups in 
educational settings (universities, colleges ...) with a tailored CMS.

One simple example (lots of others in your minds, I'm sure) : graduate 
student X joins research group Y. Although the research focus of X has 
yet to be defined specifically, X works in the "ballpark" of the 
reseearch domain of group Y (else X wouldn't be there).  How could X get 
a kick start as a new researcher in that group?  Partial answer : by 
providing X with 1) access to previous knowledge of the group's research 
interests (let's restrict this notion of "knowledge" to article/book 
reviews, conference summaries and similar other textual artifacts for 
now) and 2) the possibility to add to this knowledge base and organize 
his/her own contributions to that knowledge in a meaningful way.

Of course, I see all kinds of administrative duties that could also be 
performed from within Plone for graduate students (e.g. when does X has 
to submit a final abstract of his/her project for formal approval), but 
let's start by contemplating the knowledge collection environment.

If I were a university teacher (one day maybe ..), I would find such an 
instrument to be a formidable drive for my team to work together.

Yves Moisan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> To go further in requirements analysis, it would be nice if we could think
> of a proper infrastructure to manage research and research "elements" (e.g.
> projects, graduate students ...) in universities.  Professors in
> post-secondary institutions all have a number of research projects involving
> groups of graduate students (sometimes undergrads).  It would be nice to be
> able to think of those worlds as having a "research oriented" view in which
> participants in individual research projects would have a common location to
> communicate (forum, bibliography repository ...) and also an
> "administrative" view in which all management activities (e.g. grants,
> research reports ...) and artifacts (e.g. student presentations and official
> academic artifacts such as term papers or even theses) linked to a research
> project would be stored.  I can see tons of artifacts to store in such a
> CMS.  Of course, we would have to define the level of granularity to which
> we would want such a system to go to on the administrative side of things
> (i.e. do we want students to store each version of their master's thesis in
> the system?), but that's a nice problem to think about!
> 
> It would be nice if a professor had a little "kit" to give a new graduate
> student, that kit obviously being an electronic account  which would readily
> give the new student a whole environment in which to do his/her work.  I
> believe such an environment, implemented in Plone, would be a very unifying
> element in the educational community.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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