CFWheels in Use at the OII
Obviously, I’ve been a fan of CFWheels for a fair while now. So naturally, when the opportunity came to build a new app from scratch, there was only one real contender.
At the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) – where you can find me from 9-5 (most of the time) – we’ve primarily been a research department, with no students. This changed a few years ago, with the introduction of a DPhil programme, and more recently, an MSc programme.
Naturally, when you throw 30 students a year together, and another 20 or so tutors/lecturers, you’re going to need some sort of organisational/courseware app. For the first year or two, we tried Wikis, Sakai, trialled Moodle, kept well away from Blackboard (due to licensing) but none of them quite did what we wanted them to. They all were built for another purpose – delivering complete courses online, or managing things we didn’t need, creating a lot of UI clutter.
Enter the new CFWheels app, nicknamed ‘Plato’ (not officially called Plato, as I think there’s *already* some existing courseware with that name). Let’s call it cfPlato then.
The aim was to build a closed system which fullfilled the following:
- To list courses, their outlines and who’s teaching them
- For Tutors to communicate with their students via bulk email
- A complete email archive for all courses and groups
- File storage, with archiving, tagging and bulk downloading via .zip
- Individual user accounts
- File submission
- Deadline listings with notifications
- Threaded discussion via Forums
- Facilities for smaller groups, similar to courses
- Multiple user roles, such as tutor, student, administrator etc.
- Full logging and audit trail
- Avatar uploading and cropping
- Ability for students to provide anonymous Course feedback
I can up with the idea that we should give access to pretty much everything to authenticated users, then allow student to ‘subscribe’ to their areas of interest; Subscribing means they get email notifications etc, and various shortcuts in the system to their courses of choice. Whilst this puts the responsibility of subscribing to courses in the hands of the students, it removes a large administrative overhead.
As this is currently a closed system, I can’t demo it properly, but I thought it might interest other people to get an idea of the sort of apps which are starting to spring up based on CFWheels.
Tonnes of screenshots here as a Flickr slideshow. Turn on Descriptions/comments for some more info:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfordalto/sets/72157625977093921/show/
Built using CFWheels, CF8, BlueprintCSS, JQuery, JQuery Tools, TinyMCE, JCrop.
Comments & Questions welcome!
