University applications?

[jerekson]

Hi, I am just exploring TODCM for possible use in our School of Teacher Education at University of Northern Colorado. I have only worked with the demos, so pardon me if some of what I ask is obvious to people who use todcm more.

1. At the university level our planning structures and evaluation systems seem to be much more based on corporate models, with mission and vision driving a strategic plan and the setting of goals. Then, of course, we have a curriculum of programs, departments, and courses that are involved with national standards.
2. Most of the curriculum software, both proprietary and this open source solution, seems to deliver on only the latter half of what I described above. Is this true of todcm? If we find that packages such as MyStrategicPlan are more amenable to creative and flexible program designs, and goal-setting, then we would be more likely to implement that kind of solution, because they may be open-ended enough for us to correlate to standards at the lower level of design--courses, units, assignments, etc. So we really need something that can help us get from mission to vision to goals first.

But todcm is a great open-source project, and I would love to be able to implement it--most of the Strategic Planning applications are proprietary. It would be great to have open code and be able to work with local developers to create apps and widgets to interact with todcm. What can people tell me here?

[David Tong]

The evaluation feature in TODCM can do some complex goal settings as an individual or as a team. The open source only comes with a simple one page evaluation that would work in most K12 schools. The whole evaluation system is template and plugin based so it is extremely powerful. We have done some complex goal-setting/evaluation implementations for couple international schools and both systems don't share much similarities but we were able to implement it in a single flexible system.

TODCM actually has many features that are already in the open source package but not activated, the goal setting is one of them.

I would not compare our goal-setting/evaluation to a full application such as MyStrategicPlan. But, our advantage being extremely flexible and customizable, and it can be fully integrated with many of the curriculum mapping features and data.

Here are the major features for our goal-setting/evaluation system:
* A goal can be created for one user or a group of users. A user can have multiple goals.
* A goal can contain one or more pages. A goal page looks very similar to our unit page as it is using the same page generator.
* A goal page can have data fields exactly like our unit page.
* Each data field can be turned off or on based on any conditions such as user access check, check data dependency from data in the same goal or any data in the system. This means different user access can see/edit different contents from the same page.
* Each goal page can also be access controlled like the data fields. So, some users can access certain pages but not the other, or page access is based on supervisor input such as approving page 1 so a user can move on to page 2 etc.
* Most curriculum data can be linked directly into a goal page.
* So, with the flexible access control and data dependency checks, we can create a work flow inside the system. This is something we have already done for schools in the past. Plus, our page generator can support all sorts data types (newest version even supports displaying images, html, web contents (Youtube, Scribe etc.), MS Word docs, PDFs, but not a kitchen sink), so the system is extremely content rich.
* Admin user can archive all goals in the system after all users have finished their goals annually.
* We can also assign different goal access to users. So, you can have supervisors, goal admin etc., and each user access level can have unique access to the goal setting pages.

The whole framework of TODCM is designed to be extremely flexible and with some customization work, a nice goal-setting system can be implemented. This needs some programming work but the end result would be a system that can satisfy most requirements if not all.