The Weblog of (a) David Jones

The following is a list of tasks I probably have to do to complete the BIM project. These are added as I progress through development work and are stored here in a central place.

Questions

The following are questions that I need to answer (possibly relying on others) in order to progress the implementation of BIM.

• How can I know which students a staff member is allocated to mark?
  BAM was built on top of OASIS (locally grown online assignment submission system) which was in turn integrated with various teaching and marking responsibilities databases. OASIS is being replaced. There are three options to how BIM can get this information:
  1. Get it from the OASIS replacement. However, if this is outside of Moodle this will limit the use of BIM to CQU.
  2. Get it from Moodle. Is there a place in Moodle that stores this information?
  3. Have the coordinator re-enter the data into BIM. This probably leads to duplication and the possibility of human error and out of date data.

Screens

For the purposes of BIM development I’ve divided its functionality up into a series of screens. The best current overview of those screens is contained in this blog post. The following contains the to do tasks associated with each screen.

Register blog screen

Used by students so they can register their blog URL with BIM.

• If no registered feed for the student
  • if not submitting URL show register form
  • if submitting URL attempt to process submission
    • if success show details
    • if fail show error and show register form again
• if registered feed show details
• Ensure all/check how hard coded HTML should be handled in terms of different languages.

Student details screen

• Need to retrieve and display the question name
• Marked answers list not complete.
• Figure out how/do it put HTML labels etc into language independent form.

Configuration screen

• Ensure that the BIM settings data is actually set correctly.
• Ensure that the BIM setting data is recognised and followed in the other screens.
• Need to allow administrator to come back change this configuration.

Show details screen

Show posts screen

• To do from work

Mark post screen

Re-allocate screen

Aggregation, mirror and allocation

At regular time periods BIM needs to try to mirror, aggregate and allocate posts to student blogs. To do tasks associated with this include:

• Need to check if SimplePie caching is the way to go.
• Need to add more error checking to the cron job. How should it report errors? email?
• Also need to add in the allocation process which is not currently being done.

Misc. tasks to do

A collection of tasks that don’t really fit anywhere in particular (yet).

• Use the “lang” stuff to enable translation.
  Currently the forms are hard-coded prototypes with text included in the PHP files. I need to separate these out to enable the internationalisation stuff.
• Clean up the interface to make it either more “Moodle” and/or better.