31 Jan 2007
Today I submitted my PhD thesis for examination. The accomplishment won’t sink in until a few more days, but I feel good about it nontheless. It has taken me close to 4 years to complete, which breaks down to about three and a half years of research and development, plus six months of thesis writing. I have produced a thesis dissertation, two journal papers, a book chapter, six conference papers, and several thousand lines of code.
The thesis dissertation marks the end of a long and eventful journey for which there are many people that I would like to acknowledge for their support along the way. Above all I would like to acknowledge the tremendous sacrifices that my parents made to ensure that I had an excellent education. For this and much more, I am forever in their debt. It is to them that I dedicate this dissertation.
I am indebted to Rafael Calvo, my supervisor, for guidance on this research topic, and on research and life in general. Thank you also for ensuring my continuous funding for the first three years of my studies. I am also grateful to Lina Markauskaite from the CoCo Lab at the Faculty of Education for providing sage advice on the design and analysis of the survey-based questionnaires used to collect data for this dissertation. Thank you both.
I am very grateful to Ron Johnston and John Currie for allowing me to trial Dotfolio within their course ENGG1803 Professional Practice. Without their support I would not have had the opportunity to evaluate my software within the largest engineering course at the University of Sydney. Thank you to all the students in ENGG1803 who voluntarily and anonymously evaluated the software.
This research also benefited tremendously from the many friends at the University of Sydney. Special thanks to Juan Jos’e Garcia Adeva, Ernie Ghiglione, David Peterson, Adam Ullman, Saul Carroll, Mark Gordon, and Cibby Pulikkaseril for countless hours spent discussing fruitful ideas over cups of coffee at the campus caf’e and schooners of beer at the Rose. Thanks also goes to Aiman Turani, Daniel Zhang, Sabrina Zhang, and Sergio Freschi from the Web Engineering Group (WEG) for contributing valuable ideas and discussion in our WEG meetings.
I would also like to acknowledge and thank the entire OpenACS developer community. Their feedback and advice has been instrumental in shaping the software for this project.
Finally, I would like to thank my partner Kim Tran for her endless love and encouragement throughout this entire journey. Without whom I would have struggled to find the inspiration and motivation needed to complete this dissertation.
04 Apr 2006
It has been a hard slog over the past couple of months working on Curriculum Central and Curriculum Tracker. Finally, I have committed both to the OpenACS CVS repository.
Curriculum Central is a system for managing outlines for Courses or Units of Study. The system is targeted at academics that have to revise their course outlines before a course can be offered. Quality assurance is built into the workflow process, which requires approval from a department or school coordinator before the information is published for students to read.
Curriculum Central was derived from the problem that students came across when trying to work out what courses they need to complete in order to finish their degree. Students want to know what courses are on offer, as well as any corresponding course requisites. This meant that the School or Department were required to publish a handbook containing a list of course offerings and their dependencies. Maintaining the information in this handbook was not transparent to academics, and therefore inconsistencies crept in. This resulted in misinformed students that were not able to graduate, as they had completed courses that were not core to the degree they were undertaking.
Curriculum Central offers a collaborative space for academics to coordinate the curriculum for degree offerings. The information can then be published for students to view. The system offers two view types: course listings; and course maps. The course listing is a page showing a list of courses that are either core or recommended for a degree stream. The course maps is a graphical representation of the same information. Clicking on a course box will show all prerequisite courses in the course maps view. This allows the student to work out what courses need to be completed before enrolling in a desired course.
Curriculum Central also allows the student to export a degree overview from the system as an XML document. The student can then import the XML document into Curriculum Tracker, which is an application designed specifically for students. Curriculum Tracker allows the student to tick off courses that they have completed. This provides students with an overview of their progress through their degree.
Furthermore, the course information has been designed to have Graduate Attributes integrated into it. Graduate Attributes are qualities that a student gains from completing a degree. All courses help contribute to these attributes, which include: Communication; Research and Inquiry; Ethical, Social and Professional Understanding; Information Literacy; and Personal and Intellectual Autonomy.
By completing a course, a student is able to develop their graduate attributes. Curriculum Tracker offers a chart for students to track their progress in developing their graduate attributes. The chart allows students to identify their weaker characteristics, which may influence their decision in selecting future courses to enrol in, so that they can build on these weaker characteristics. Therefore, Curriculum Tracker allows students to manage their own personal development through their degrees.
Curriculum Tracker is a standalone application, but can be integrated into dotFOLIO quite easily. In fact, Curriculum Tracker offers much more when it is integrated with dotFOLIO. Using dotFOLIO’s clipper feature, students are able to clip work completed for a course to the course outlines in Curriculum Tracker. This provides context for the work completed, as they are related directly with the course that the work was completed for.
I believe these additions will make dotFOLIO that much closer to what people envision electronic portfolios to be.