Disconnecting learning targets

[justinvincent]

Is it possible to disconnect the learning targets from the standards so that they can be entered into the system without a standard/strand? My school is private (we don't follow state or common core standards) and are in the middle of a curriculum alignment with the eventual goal of creating our own curriculum framework (strands, standards, etc.) using a bottom-up design process. The goal of this framework is to connect our current course unit objectives (effectively our unit learning targets) to our school mission statement/goals. We would like to start this process by entering our course unit objectives (learning targets) into the system independent of any standard. Is this possible? Is there a way to create a template that would work for this purpose? I've been experimenting with creating a custom template to do this, but I fear that it may not be possible with just a modified unit template.

[David Tong]

Yes, we do support entering benchmarks without a standard or strand. The benchmarks will become course level based and are managed by the course editors instead of the admin user. We had done this for one of our managed TODCM sites. This requires changes to the config.php, unit template, search template, admin template and couple database tables. The actual source code is already in the open source package, the most important files are system/application/controllers/course/outcomes.php and system/application/libraries/unit/unit_os.php.

The problem is once you start with this setup there is no easy way to add strands and standards later. Basically, they are 2 separate template modules - one deals with learning-targets/benchmarks with standards and strands, the other one deals with course level benchmarks without standards. These 2 template modules are not compatible even though they use the same database tables. You can't begin with one module and switch to the other later. The fact is that the unit_os.php template module will assign all benchmarks to one dummy standard and one dummy strand. You could go into the database and reassign the dummy standard but this is a lot of direct database modification.

The one used in the open source package supporting strands and standards is system/application/libraries/unit/uph/uph_lt_extended.php, the other one is system/application/libraries/unit/unit_os.php mentioned above.

We are still in the process of documenting the template module parameters and I can send you what we have so you can look into the module parameters.

It looks to me your school needs good amount of customization work over the standard open source package and you should consider getting commercial customization and support from us. There are many advantages letting us to maintain the templates and configurations of a TODCM site, like guaranteeing all customizations will work for future TODCM releases etc. Please let me know if you need more detail.

[justinvincent]

Thank you for the information. If you could send me the documentation mentioned that would be great. This seems like a much better solution than mine (all teachers would enter objectives as teacher eq, this required some unit template rearrangement and stage renaming).

I agree that we need a lot of customization. Unfortunately, spending money on this is not an option. That's why I was so excited when I found your open source software. For now, I'll see how much of the customization I can handle. Thanks again for the help.

[David Tong]

I have decided to add another set of templates to support the second learning target module - unit_os.php. This is the one that does not require strands and standards. This will be made available in a new release of TODCM within one month. I think you are not the only school would run into the same issue and this would make life easier for you and others.

[justinvincent]

Thank you very much! That will definitely make things easier on my end. I appreciate your help.

[justinvincent]

I take it from the release notes and my testing with the new TODCM release that the ability to create learning targets without strands/standards will not be available in the open source version. Are there plans for this functionality to be added to the open source release any time in the future? Thanks for the help.

[David Tong]

I take it from the release notes and my testing with the new TODCM release that the ability to create learning targets without strands/standards will not be available in the open source version. Are there plans for this functionality to be added to the open source release any time in the future? Thanks for the help.

We are still working on this and it is scheduled to be available in about 3-4 weeks. It requires a lot more work than I thought and it is very complex and a lot of new code and new design...

[justinvincent]

That's great! I apologize if my post sounded ungrateful, it was unintentional. I understand that a lot of work goes into a project like this and I really appreciate your effort for the open source community.

[David Tong]

That's great! I apologize if my post sounded ungrateful, it was unintentional. I understand that a lot of work goes into a project like this and I really appreciate your effort for the open source community.

Don't worry, I didn't think it was intended to be ungrateful. It is partly my fault since I can't provide a project road map or a well defined release schedule so users would know what is coming in the pipeline...

[David Tong]

We have just released version 1.1.1.0 which consists a new feature to switch template to allow course based benchmarks. Please read the release notes from the download page for more detail. For questions concerning this new release you can post them to this thread: http://todcm.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=145.