Course Management Domain

To Do

This page needs to be more general. Include Problem Statement here?

This space is dedicated to developing a common understanding of the Course Management domain. Our work here is to create a shared set of documentation that will orient our team and the community to the important concepts in Course Management. Documentation can also be found in /wiki/spaces/ARCHIVE/pages/19428639036.

First, we need to be clear on the distinction between enterprise institutional data (roughly "the world outside of Sakai web sites"; mostly, although not always, related to academic courses) and LMS/CMS/CLE data (roughly "what's controlled inside Sakai").

For the most part for most schools, enterprise integration is a matter of Sakai code consuming and making use of enterprise data in various ways: to set up site names and descriptions, find out administrative roles, get automatic membership feeds, and so on. In some cases, the LMS/CMS/CLE might send data back out to external systems – notably by submitting final grades for students, but also possibly by broadcasting section switches and so on – but even then the terms of the integration tend to be set by the external systems rather than by the LMS/CMS/CLE. Few registrars are going to change their rules for the benefit of a new LMS.

There are two sides to the problem of making integration simple and pluggable:

Model the external institutional data that Sakai needs. (Not necessarily the whole world of higher education – just what an LMS/CMS/CLE most needs to know.)
Change Sakai to take advantage of the external institutional data.