Hi Don,
Are you being sarcastic? I followed the link given above to Instructure / Canvas (http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview) and kept getting "There is currently no text in this page." and similar messages.
Am I missing something?
Glenys
>>Are you being sarcastic?
No, very serious. I was blown away by the rubric designer and the notifications master control panel--both very intuitive and powerful. Also I set up my own course in Canvas rather quickly (they offer free courses to individual teachers--something Moodle should do) and noticed how tightly integrated BigBlueButton is.
They make a big point that PHP is the language of 2000s decade and Ruby is the language of this decade. Is that true? I assume that means Canvas is done in Ruby not PHP. Anyway, a beautiful interface that is not Flash. Also, they seem to be open source. How difficult would it be to port the rubric designer into Moodle?
Hi Don,
Could you give us some direct links to the goodies?
Cheers,
Glenys
Hi Glenys,
It is the same link as above: http://support.instructure.com/index.php?title=Overview
You will see three demo videos. The first is a good overview and about 2-3 minutes into it you will see the notifications master control page. The second one goes into that in more detail. On the third demo (just below it) you can see how assignments are graded and see the Rubrics design page. On the main Instructure page: http://www.instructure.com/ you can make a course by clicking on the big button "Try Canvas Instantly".
Definitely very cool.
They make a big point that PHP is the language of 2000s decade and Ruby is the language of this decade. Is that true?
I call FUD They do say Facebook is from PHP and Twitter is from Ruby
. Ruby provides alot of built in shortcuts, but has issues with scalability. With all their millions I still get that "Twitter is over capacilty" message a few times a day - w/as I alsmost never see Facebook down or even slow (even back when they were no richer than Twitter is now
). Wikipedia regularly serves over 60,000,000 unique visitors/day on a shoe string budget.
Anyway, Ruby doesn't make a good Rubric designer module, to do that you need a team, time, and a budget, with an educator to say what and how it should work, a system architect and UI designer to create a mockup and specification, coder(s) to build it as close to the design spec as she/he can get in the number of hours they can afford, and a project manager to keep the whole thing on track.
The hard part is not choosing the "right" server side scripting language, most of the front end 'oooohs', 'ahhs', drags, drops, shades and fades are fron AJAX toolkits like Dojo and jQuery that work happily with PHP, Python, Ruby, even asp.NET. The hard part is getting a good team together and keeping them funded and on track from start to completion. O and good coffee, keep it coming
.
Thanks, Michael, this is very helpful. So you're saying the beautiful rubric design module in Canvas was *not* done in Ruby per se, but rather through an AJAX toolkit like Dojo or jQuery, which can be applied to PHP as well. Did I summarize that right? That means I could duplicate the lovely curves, fades, shades, drags and drops right here in Moodle with the tools you mentioned.
Actually, as a project manager, I have built a rubric designer for Moodle 1.7 before, in the assessment section of the Project Module. However, the interface was so bad, I lost interest and moved on to other projects. I agree about the difficulties of funding and design, and have been successful in some cases even with extremely limited funding. Probably due to really good coffee. Watch for the Sharing Cart 2.1--now approaching its fourth year! Very popular but definitely needing some pro UI design advice.