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Independent of how sites are organized (existing portal, GoogleTools, etc.), there is a need to allow users to easily create pages that can be linked to other pages. These should be as flexible as possible in terms of layout and allow a rich set of content elements to be added to a page, including: marked up text, lists, tables, media objects (video, audio, flash, applets, etc.), and embeddable tools (GoogleTools, Widgets, synoptic Sakai tools, etc.).
1.1 The CARET Use Case
1.1.1 The CARET Use Case (Portfolio)
To make a point I have adapted the Portfolio Content Authoring Use Case for this context. The changes are tiny.
School of Education
Context:
The School of Education has several tracks, such as for Early Childhood Education, Science Education, Secondary Education, etc. Each track is administered by different faculty members, with specific requirements, etc. The school does not set the path students should take through their program, allowing students to sequence their classes in the order they choose as long as they meet certain requirements. Items in parentheses indicate functional requirements supporting the activity being described.
Departmental needs:
Although the SOE department has an overarching model for what student web pages portfolios should include (department-defined scaffolding), the department is allowing faculty within each track to provide some customization about what content is required for their students (track-specific scaffolding). For example, Science Education wants their students to include a specialization web portfolio page where students describe their focus within science education. In contrast, Early Childhood Education wants their students to include exact lesson plans that all follow a very specific format (portfolio page templates). Once students have completed their web pages portfolios, the department would like access to completed web pages portfolios for demonstrating outcomes to accreditation agencies. In addition, they would like students to be able to share their web pages portfolio with the department so it can be used in their thumbnail gallery (publish to gallery as thumbnail). The gallery would include a search function where student web pages portfolios could be sorted based on student-applied tags to portfolio pages and text (tagging of text and portfolio pages). The department could also use these tags for generating reports on all portfolio web pages for accreditation agencies (reporting of tagged data).
Student needs:
Alex is a first year student in the SOE in the Early Childhood track. A final requirement of her research methods course is to complete a web portfolio page about her fieldwork that includes information about the research methods she applied to improve her lesson plans. Midway through the semester, she received some feedback on an assignment that prompts her to begin her first portfolio page. She immediately clicks on the "create a portfolio add page" link in her personal site and starts authoring (able to start a new page anywhere that can be later linked into a portfolio). On this particular portfolio page, she wants to include a portion of her last assignment (ability to include material from other tools), as well as embed multimedia files of her work in the classroom (ability to embed video, audio, etc.) She also has many images of the classroom that she would like to include on this particular page (easily add images).
While Alex is authoring, she likes taking breaks from working on content by playing with the design of the page. She quickly chooses left hand navigation and autumn hues for her color scheme (ability to select placement of navigation and preset color choices for the page) "apply theme" and views the result. Alex really likes having instant visualisation of the impact of different themes and tries several before finally settling on her preference. visual cues for selecting the navigation and color hues, so she doesn't have to guess what each of them will look like (visual cues for selecting skins, colors, navigation, etc.). Later, she finds that a friend who is a whizz with CSS has made an even better theme and she uploads and applies that theme. Finally she edits the theme by selecting an image of kids playing in leaves as the background for her navigation area (ability to upload images and use them as background images).
After she has included all of her content and has a design she is happy with, she decides to request feedback from her professor. From her portfolio page she uses the system's "request feedback" option and writes a note about what she is struggling with (ability to request feedback and send email to person giving feedback).
While Alex waits for feedback from the faculty member, she decides to create a web portfolio page out of a lesson plan she had created in Microsoft Word using a .dot file provided by the department. This template defines a number of styles that translate well to HTML, such as h1, h2, h3, and h4 headings. She starts a new portfolio page and uses the import from word function, which automatically transfers the styles, layout, and content from Word into her portfolio page (import from word that includes styles, tables, etc.).
After playing with the design and putting final touches on her lesson plan page, she receives notification that her professor has provided feedback (notification when feedback is received). Alex saves the lesson plan and jumps to the feedback from the faculty member (easy to navigate between feedback, authored pages, and other tools). The faculty member has written in-line feedback as well as general comments about her images and text (ability to provide feedback in ways similar to "track changes"). The main comment is that Alex should provide a link on the methods page to the exact lesson plan she is referencing. Fortunately, this is the lesson plan Alex just created as another portfolio page, so she quickly adds a link to the lesson plan (ability to set anchors, quickly find other portfolio pages for linking, and link between portfolio pages), makes some other changes based on the feedback (see feedback and portfolio page at the same time), and feels pretty good about her two pages.
Alex decides to publish a portfolio of her two pages so she can share it with her family and friends. She is able to quickly assemble and publish her mini-portfolio (ability to quickly assemble and publish). After the portfolio is assembled, she uses the share function to write an email to her family and friends (share with university and non-university affiliated groups/individuals), which automatically includes the short URL to her portfolio (meaningful URL creation). Her grandpa doesn't have access to the internet, though, so she downloads a copy of her portfolio onto a CD and will share it with him next time she visits him (downloadable/exportable with images, text, links, etc).
1.2 Syllabus Authoring
An instructor wants to build a home (or other) page for the site that gives students an outline of what will happen in the course. Potential organizational structures include thematic and calendar-based. Each section of the syllabus has a place for the instructor to write a description of that section and to link to relevant resources and activities that the students need.
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