As a new member of the team I thought it would be useful to produce an overall architectural view of the main workflow packages that are to be built as part of the streamline project. I produced a conceptual architecture model that identifies the key elements.  The final aim of the working system is to allow access to the streamline functionality via multiple mechanisms. Initially however user involvement will be via a Java based GUI developed by Dawn. Eventually a web-based GUI will be the way to go, once the interface requirements have been developed, tested and evaluated by end users.  The underlying areas of the system will be required to do some number crunching, e.g. the latent semantic analysis which will allow related search results to be displayed to the user.  Initially these components have been developed using C++ and Matlab due to the suitability of these languages for rapid mathematical programming.  The intention is however, to convert all the components into Java in order to provide ease of integration and allow the system to be opened up to third party application via web-services and a Java API. A prototype of a parsing algorithm (to be used for meta-data extraction) has also been developed in C++ by Elizabeth. In order to allow ease of translation a UML model of this prototype has been created.  This should also ease further development of the prototype up to a stage where it ready for translation and integration into the full system.

 

The Technology Learning Day took place last Tuesday 3rd June and presented a good opportunity to promote both the above projects.  As we’re at the stage where Streamline prototypes have been built, user feedback is necessary to enable development work to progress steadily.  A decision was made to test the prototype and gather feedback from knowledgeable users and the likely participants were anticipated to be attending the TEL day.  Many were approached with a few questions, and indicated their willingness to take part in the evaluation. 

The proposed evaluation plan is to carry out a series of focus groups with about 8 people.   The discussion is to identify the difficulties and good aspects experienced while trying to create, find and reuse learning objects - particularly in adding metadata to a learning objects using any tool such as eCAT or CourseGenie or using metadata to do keyword searches within a learning object repository.

The outcomes of these focus groups will be a rich source to facilitate research!