OpenSyllabus and other Sakai tools integration

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Jun 09, 2011 by Former user (Deleted)Version comment
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Introduction

One of the major functionalities in OpenSyllabus is its ability to reference entities of other Sakai tool. The user can contextualize and reference other existing tools entities in Sakai.Two different level of integration are available in OpenSyllabus. We will describe each integration and the tools they apply to.

Integrated tools

1- Citation and Resources: SDATA

Citations and Resources are integrated using Sdata. This integration goes further than a basic integration because not only we are able to reference documents and citations created from resources but we are also able to make some minor modifications to these entities from OpenSyllabus.

For a user who has a lots of citations and documents to reference in his syllabus the switch between each tool is reduced to a minimum.

Philosophy

The principles underlying the integration of the Sakai's tool follow two guidelines.

  1. Choose bare minimal functionalities necessary to develop the tool on the client side.
    Since each Sakai's tool comes with a complete user-interface, we won't reinvent the wheel. We choose the minimal parameters that will be used to implement the tool on the client side of OpenSyllabus based on the essential needs of a course outline. This way we make sure that we have a better control of the synchronization process, we are not reimplementing the tool and we are using it to our best interest.
  2. OpenSyllabus minimal user-interface we will offer the possibility to:
    1. Create a new reference to the Sakai tool and link it to the course outline
    2. Link an existing reference of the the tool to the course outline
    3. Directly modify one of minimal functionalities defined or access th tool to modify other parameters
    4. Access the tool remove a reference

Synchronization

When it comes to integration, synchonization is always a big issue, for OpenSyllabus, in order to insure the integrity of the data, most of the modifications are left to the original tool or automatic. From the OpenSyllabus client-side, we create a new  reference to the tool or modify the minimal parameters defined, for the deletion or the big modifications, we refer the user to the tool user interface.

For now the user controls the entities and their references in the syllabus