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SSP Project Summary:
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Student
Robert Byrne, Trinity College Dublin
Supervisor
Mario Antonioletti, EPCC
The Foundations of Physics half-course, Physics 1Ah, was ported to use
a web-based delivery mechanism this year. Behind the scenes a
question-authoring CGI script was developed for Physics by EPCC which
enabled the course team to author questions via the web. These could
then be exported to WebCT, a semi-commercial delivery package, and
also to latex format which could be used to provide paper-based
sources of the material. In its development the authoring script
became what can best be described as a monolithic working
prototype. It consists of over 4000 lines of Perl code with a lot of
hacks to change behaviour, add functionality and correct or work
around bugs.
WebCT comes with its own question-authoring software but this was not
used because:
- a conscious choice was made to use latex as the input format. This
required pre-processing that had to be done outside of WebCT.
- a conscious attempt was made to decouple the authoring mechanism from
the delivery mechanism. However at the moment the authoring script is
coupled more tightly to WebCT than is desirable.
The aims of this SSP project are:
- to streamline and modularise the existing code. This should help the
maintenance and extension of these scripts in the future. It should also
make things a little bit faster.
- to decouple somewhat the export mechanism to WebCT to allow
another export module to be incorporated to export to another delivery
mechanism. This would return the authoring script to the
originally-envisaged goals.
- to examine existing practice and try to streamline and/or improve
it - make the reliance of external packages, e.g. latex2html and unix
commands, more robust. Examine new technologies, e.g. XML, to see
whether these can be incorporated.
- to add new functionality - physics may wish to incorporate new
functionality to the package after having used it for a year.
- provision of documentation - this would be required as well as
the project report. At the moment there is not a great deal of
documentation other than in the source available.
- examine the existing security model to see whether it can be
improved.
The final report for this project is available here.
Webpage maintained by
mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk