Course Management Service Requirements
Date: May 3, 2005
Version: 6
1. Overview
The following requirements are defined for the Sakai Course Management Service. This service provides the ability to define and organize courses in a higher educational environment. These requirements were gathered from a number of sources including:
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The first version of this document also includes requirements from a variety of other sources including Sakai email, SAMigo Façade classes, and legacy course management APIs. Subsequent versions include substantial input from members of the Sakai Architecture and Tools Teams.
2. Definitions
A Canonical Course is a general course that exists across sessions. It is an abstract course.
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A Course Section is an instance of a course offering that has a schedule, location, roster, etc. A section is a way to represent a group of people associated with a course or class. These groups may include everyone on in the class or course, or may be subsets of that whole group. Sections may have sub-sections. Sections are defined differently in different universities. Some define sections strictly in a student information or registrar system. Others define them completely within the course management systems. Still others use a mix of both approaches.
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A Student is a participant in a course. Students will have an enrollment status.
A +Leader + is the leader of a course section. Sections that are classes will have one or more instructors as leaders. Sections that are not classes, such as labs or discussion groups may optionally have a lab manager, discussion group leader, etc.
3. General Requirements
1. For Sakai to produce a product that is useful for education, it needs a rich view of course management, groups, and sites, as well as grading and other services.
2. Course Management objects must be persistent, according to the guidelines laid down by the Sakai Framework.
3. The Course Management API should be a proper superset of the OKI Course Management OSID.
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7. Course Management shall be fully integrated into the Sakai SuperStructure. This structure defines a hierarchy of courses and allows additional information to be associated, such as content and tools.
4. Course Structure
4.1. The Canonical Course
1. A means must be provided to represent a canonical course.
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4. Canonical courses may be persistent across sessions.
4.2. The Course Offering
1. A means must be provided to represent a course offering.
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4. The course offering must have a person designated as the default leader of this course. The course offering must have a list of enrolled students. Each enrolled student is required to have an enrollment status type and an enrollment record. The course offering must also include a list of other people who are associated with this course, such as assistants, substitutes, etc. Roles of the people included in this list are outside the scope of these requirements (see Authorization and Agent/Groups).
Enrollment at in the offering is separate from enrollment in a section. This allows for working with the offering's enrollment as a whole separate from working with enrollment for a particular section. The offering enrollment may be the simple sum of all the section enrollments or may include people in the offering but not in a section. People may be included in multiple sections.
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6. The course offering is specific to a session and is not necessarily persistent across sessions except for archival purposes. Special sessions may be defined for course offerings that fall outside the norm, such as those that span regular sessions, or consist of half sessions.
4.3. The Course Section
1. A means must be provided to represent a course section.
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8. A means must be provided to allow students to enroll in one instance of a set of sections of a given type. Self-enrollment must have an override by the instructor or administrator. Some method to specify a start and end time of enrollment must be defined. Additionally, open-ended enrollment must be allowed.
4.4. The Course Set
1. A means must be provided to represent a course set.
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3. It may contain a list of canonical courses associated with this set.
4.5. The Session
1. A means must be provided to represent a session.
2. A session contains the following information: title, abbreviation, school year, current session flag, unique identifier, session type, start/end time or schedule, and grading start/end time or schedule.
4.6. Enrollment Records
1. A means must be provided for an enrollment record.
2. An enrollment record contains the following information: a reference to a person, type, role, status, credits, and course reference. Course credit is based on the default credits in the Canonical Course and may be modified on the basis of participation status.
5. Management Operations
1. The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment include includes embedded administration operations. Management and administrative requirements are included here.
5.1. Canonical Course Management
1. A means must be provided to create, delete, and update information in a canonical course.
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4. A means must be provided to create course equivalence.
5.2. Course Offering Management
1. A means must be provided to create, delete, and update information in a course offering.
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3. A means must be provided to add or remove sub-groups to a course offering (labs, project groups, etc.).
5.3. Course Section Management
1. A means must be provided to create, delete, and update information in a course section.
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8. A method to associate a section with a SuperStructure node must be provided. The SuperStructure is used to contain resources associated with it such as tools, content, etc. A means must be provided to share content across different sections. A means must be provided to share content space across different sections so that content can be pushed once and shared by all.
5.4. Course Group Management
1. A means must be provided to create, delete, and update information in a course group.
3. A method must be provided to add or remove canonical courses from a course group.
5.5. Import and Export
1. The ability to archive and import descriptions of courses should be supported using data interchange standards where they exist.
6. Query and Access Operations
1. A means must be provided to get canonical courses associated with a given canonical course. An additional means must be provided to get a list of canonical courses by type or session.
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8. A means must be provided to get a list of course offerings or sections which a person is associated with, given a particular role such as teacher, student, or assistant.
Contributors
Name | Affiliation |
Mark Norton | Sakai Educational Partnership Program |
Charles Severance | University of Michigan |
Peter Wilkins | MIT |
Craig Counterman | MIT |
Scott Thorne | MIT |
Rachel Golub | Stanford University |
Daisy Fleming | Stanford University |
Oliver Heyer | U. of California at Berkeley |
Glenn Golden | University of Michigan |
Document History
Date | Version | Changes |
1/28/05 | 1 | Initial requirements where gathered from the OKI Course Management OSID, the Sakai Course Management API, email and personal discussions. |
1/31/05 | 2 | Additional requirements suggested by UCB including sub-groups within offerings and sections. Get courses given person query. |
2/1/05 | 3 | Define student and instructor. Refine definitions of other terms. Restructured sections, added requirement numbers. Added instructor role. Added other participants. Added requirement to associated generic information with an offering or section, this includes grading and descriptive information. Restricted members of sub-groups to members of this course. |
2/8/05 | 4 | Final requirements. Corrections provided by Craig Counterman. Course Offerings may be based on special term definitions. Clarifications made to enrollment in Course Offering. Clarifications made on course credits by providing for default credits in a Canonical Course and actual credits in the Enrollment Record, potentially modified by participation status. Definition of course grade record was removed since grades are now considered generic additional information. This allows it to be specified in the Grading API instead. The definition of Enrollment Record was added. |
4/6/05 | 5 | Misc. changes, unpublished. |
5/3/05 | 6 | Requirements suggested by the Sakai Tools Team for sectioning. See earlier version, Section-Requirements-v1. Expanded the definition of Course Section. General requirement to be integrated into the Sakai SuperStructure. Re-drew the structure diagram to remove Groups and make sections being recursive. Removed groups from offerings and sections. Change the name of Course Groups to Course Sets. Terms become Sessions. Substantial additional requirements added for course section. |