[wp-edu] GSoC 2010, BuddyPress for teaching

[Stas Sușcov]

During the last #wordpress-gsoc chat, Jane pointed me to the
ScholarPress, a community of WordPress plugins developers that are
writing code to make WordPress useful in education. Their plugin,
Courseware is built for WordPress and currently offers the following
features:

      * manage schedules
      * manage bibliography
      * manage assignments
      * manage general course information

>From what I heard the plugin also works with BuddyPress, but making it
depends on WordPress (shortcodes, wp-admin) isn’t exactly a perfect
integration. The idea what came is to port ScholarPress to BuddyPress.
In details, to make SP aware of BP groups, and treat them as classes of
students. Assign schedules per group, add bibliography to scheduled
courses, so on for assignments. From the upstream TODO list, I also saw
the need of a grade-book and I would also add a notification system
(send a private message if a course is upcoming or a new grade was
posted).


More on the internal part…
It will require changes like, split the courses apart from schedules.
Because SP will be groups aware, it will be more logical to create
courses and link bibliographies and assignments to them, after what
publish them in a schedule. Also I would consider adding an upload
option for the courses that require annexes or attachments (later, you
can bundle those with Google Docs viewer or psview).
About the gradebook, I liked the idea used for kb-gradebook, and I think
it’s the bare minimal implementation of grades assignment I can consider
as a starting point (read the csv file, and assign group members to
marks).


About users…
In most of the education centers students are managed using a LDAP or
ActiveDirectory. So bringing some core functionality into such a plugin
also should be considered. I know you’ll jump that there are plenty of
plugins that offer LDAP integration, but hey, none of them (afaik) will
offer you options to integrate two baseDN’s into the same instance (this
can be really useful for role mappings also, divide students from
teachers).

I’m a student and at our university I had the opportunity to play a
little with Moodle, so the above idea is based on my experience. It
would be nice to hear some opinions from persons who are really involved
into teaching process and what would they like to see in such a new
ScholarPress.

There's also a post I wrote (this is a copycat) about this idea at:
http://sushkov.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/scholarpress-buddypress/

Thanks.

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