Seneca Content System: Website tool update and note about Blackboard Support Knowledgebase Wiki

Just a quick note to those who may be using the Blackboard Content System and our building block for websites within Content System.  It has been updates and the new file is available from http://buildingblocks.blackboard.com.

Updates include:

1. Fix for Learning System 7.2 - the instructions within the building block are incorrect for 7.2.  Blackboard changed the Tomcat configuration slightly for Tomcat clustering so the instructions are only slightly different but enough that the websites were not available.  Please check the instructions if you are going to Blackboard Learning System 7.2 with Content System.
2. Fix for  Learning System 7.3 - I used some private APIS (guilty as charged!) which went away due to some changes in Content System for 7.3, I guess.  I changed the code so it would work using the standard APIs so it's working just like it used to but it's a little less fancy in terms of source code.  It's probably best to upgrade before you go to 7.3 so you won't see the error but if you upgrade after, its not a big deal.  Just do this during your upgrade.

As I am doing with all of my public building blocks, I will be putting up a page on http://kb.blackboard.com so that it can be searched when system admins are at the Bb Knowledgebase Wiki.  If you are a building blocks developer that makes your blocks freely available, I would encourage you to do the same thing and please use my examples as a template, if you like.  I;ve always thought it was good to put support notes in a central location for all of these public building blocks that various institutions create and make publicly available and the Bb KBWiki is the perfect place for it, in my view.

 

Posted at Thursday Jul 19, 2007

My Courses Plus: Ready for release

I think it's finally done.  My Courses Plus is ready for release after some interesting issues with cascading style sheets.  I thought I'd have more issues with the Javascript and Ajax but our version has been in production for a couple of weeks and I think we've ironed out all of the bugs.  The biggest issue was specifically with Netscape 7.2 (not 7.0) and a combination of style sheet attributes that made the column that this module was on within Community System take up the whole page.  It's fixed now.

The module looks a little different than previous versions that were shown here.  It sports new icons.  It is also internationalized which means it has functionality similar to language packs like in the base Blackboard Learning System product.  We do have our own custom version because we have a photo roster built in but development is easier because of I can now copy most files over untouched with our own specific wording.  Here, at Seneca College, we call courses "subjects" and we call Blackboard "My.Seneca".  The picture on the left is of the My Courses Plus and not our My Subjects module. (I accidently replaced the old picture so it will look the same as the new one )
 

If you would like a copy to play with please email me at Santo.Nucifora@senecac.on.ca and I will send it to you by email.  I don't want to publicly post this yet as there may be minor cosmetic issues  with various browsers to address but the base code has been working for a number of years in our older non-DHTML/Ajax version.

Santo Nucifora

Posted at Friday May 11, 2007

My Courses Plus ongoing development

Just a quick update...

 Development is ongoing with this.  I was just about ready to make it available when I decided to take a look at the stock Advanced Courses module in Blackboard to see what it did.  I have not looked at this module in a long time as we use an iteration of the My Courses Plus module for ourselves and it has been working flawlessly for many years. I didn't realize the stock module showed announcements, calendar entries and tasks so I figured I would build it in too (if this was to replace the existing module).  I did not build the functionality in to add external courses as this would be possible (utilizing the My Weblinks module code that I put out a while ago) but I didn't want to complicate things.  Well...

The functionality is complete but I'm having issues with the user interface because all web browsers are not created equally.  As displayed in this graphic, the instructor interface works great on Firefox, IE7 and Opera but the "Other" view (anything but instructor) of some of the tools is problematic.  First off, the Tasks API is not public so, if it works, that's great.  If it doesn't, there is a way to turn it off (and any other tool in this module).  The Calendar/Tasks/Announcements API is quite old so I'm sure this will be revamped soon but until then, this will work.  Secondly, I can't just let the links to the announcements/calendar/tasks go to the respective pages.  I gotta get "fancy" and make them show up in the actual module on demand (and this almost works).  This is purely a fault of mine as nothing is ever perfect.

Anyway, this is where my browser issues come in.  I work on a prototype and get it working just right and then I try it in  IE7 and it's a disaster.  IE does some weird things with margins/borders  and calculations so things just don't look right.  I think I just have to scrap the whole "window frame" look and go back to something simple.  By the way, this is just a concept as I was thinking of distinguishing announcements from calendar entries and tasks with different colours and maybe a graphic somewhere.  This was borrowed from some work I did on an Ask Dr. C prototype module which is not yet released.

If everyone were to just use Firefox, I would have been done months ago   Anyway, I'm pretty close but I am busy this week in a "Dive into Mozilla" course that is a week long course on building and developing Mozilla and extensions.  But that's the topic of another post coming soon...

Posted at Tuesday Feb 27, 2007

My Course Plus almost released...

After several years of using the My Seneca - Subjects module at Seneca, I decided to make it available to the community for two reasons. 

1. I usually do make some of what we've created available to the Building Blocks community if it can be used elsewhere in the spirit of academia.
2. It's my first real Ajax project.   I tend to practice new technology and techniques with something concrete.  This is my concrete example.
   
3. Okay, there is actually three.  I said I was going to make it public a long time ago and several years have passed.  It's time
   

There's a lot of confusion from beginners on the net about Ajax and just plain dynamic HTML.  So, just so that everyone knows, it actually does use Ajax for a couple of things.   The My Organizations Plus module was an off-shoot of our My.Seneca - Subjects module.  It was actually a stripped down version with the added ability to enroll users in organizations because we can't do it the way we are configured.  Anyway, there are traces of a tree view that is pretty much fixed in My Orgs Plus because it's always one level but the new My Courses Plus (as was the case in our internal My.Seneca - Subjects module) has a dynamic tree view.  This new module uses Ajax to expand and collapse semester views (you can see it in the graphic).  When you collapse a semester folder, an Ajax request goes back to the server and stores a value so that it "remembers" when you come back.  Ajax is also used for the What's New functionality (it's a severe hack but it works on demand as opposed to having to have the module on your page which is resource intensive).

 It has it's fair share of dynamic HTML as it has layered user help (for faculty) and the configuration pages were extremely time consuming as I was trying different things there.  The institution course code configuration page was particularly a pain in the neck and it stalled me for a long time but it was a good learning experience.

So, now that it's public, this Building Block allows you replace the current My Courses module, if you like. Below is a list of features that are part of this module:

• allows you to display courses sorted by term
• allows faculty to collapse and expand sorted courses
• allows quick access to course tools through a new Quick Tool Pad option.
• allows faculty to make their courses available with one click from within the Quick Tool Pad
• allows faculty to manage enrollments if the option is enabled.
• allows customizable notices for faculty and students to be shown at the top of the My Courses Plus module.

Some initial configuration needs to be entered but it's fairly straight forward.  I will be putting it up to the Building Blocks site soon.

I do want to thank Eric Kunnen and Wayne Twitchell for having a look while it was being developed.
Thankfully, it's over for now but I also just realized that the Newswire stuff is showing in the graphics I used for the help files (the one I used above).  I guess it's not over yet as I now have to do the My Announcements Plus module which allows special courses to act like Announcement repositories for various portal roles.

When will it end?

Posted at Monday Feb 12, 2007