Tuesday, December 13, 2005

 

Database Management Systems Project

CISD OpenCourseWare

Drawing from the popular concept of OpenCourseWare introduced by MIT @ http://ocw.mit.edu, I discussed the idea with one of my teachers and decided a similar system for our department would be a useful database course project for me. OpenCourseWare (or more popularly just OCW) is a simple website that offers free educational material to students and teachers alike.

The idea behind it is to share the knowledge so that it is open to all and not just our university. If realized completely, it would eradicate the need for photocopied hand-outs and all other material teachers want their students to get as it will be all be available in electronic form (PDF, DOC etc.) and could be downloaded from the website itself.

To the left is a snapshot of the homepage.

There are three types of users that access the system: first the Users (Anonymous, need no authentication), secondly the Teachers which login to their separate accounts and upload course materials (assignments, hand-outs, projects etc.) to their assigned courses' pages. Lastly, the Administrator, who has the rights to add/edit courses and teacher accounts and basically has the task of managing the whole thing.

It is a very interesting project indeed, and could be extremely useful for all if adopted by the department. We are told that we will be giving a demo of it to our Chariman, lets hope that goes well and things, for once, do change for the good.

Comments:
Great stuff! Any plans to make it open source?
 
Not in the immediate future. It's not a finished product by far and I'm really hoping the dean sahab gives us the greenlight to deploy it in the department, so that its completed asap.
 
OK. Good luck. By the way, you can cite and example that https://online.lums.edu.pk/registration was developed by students of LUMS is running as a production quality application at LUMS. What you have developed is a very useful product which many companies sell and make money with. The University should be delighted to deploy it if it meets the quality requirements, fulfills all the business rules and is flexible enough to withstand and accomodate changes to the business rules.
 
you have the most stable blog I've seen! ;)
 

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