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Quick guide Advanced

From EFrontWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 First steps 3 Interface consideration and accounts mapping 4 Settings, settings, settings… 5 Creating categories and lessons 6 Professor’s lesson dashboard 7 Working with courses 8 Putting our course to work! 9 Extending the system’s functionality 10 More things to check

[edit] Introduction

eFront is a powerful learning platform that was build to be easy and fun to use. This is a small tutorial on several concepts of the platform that can be used as an advanced “first-steps” guide to the system. When you will finish with this guide you will have an overview of eFront’s functionality, its design principles and a practical understanding of the basic tools that are included to the system. Still, there will be a lot of remaining functionality to discover as you daily work with it.

[edit] First steps

I hope you have already installed eFront in your system. If you are having problems with the installation take a look on the online installation instructions that can be found at: http://docs.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Installation_instructions

The easiest form of installation requires you to download XAMPP that includes PHP 5.2+, Apache 2+ and MYSQL 5+. All these tools are needed infrastructure for eFront server. The end-user will need only a modern browser to access the final system through internet.

After a completed installation you must see a screen as following. This is the first page of the system which you can manipulate from the admin interface in great detail as we will see later. The basic page can include info about the system, a searchable course catalog, a lesson’s shopping basket, the login box as well as custom boxes with content and information.

Let’s first manipulate this screen to make it fit our needs. To do that, we need to login to the system as an Administrator and select Visual Settings. This will brings us to the following screen. From the left panel you we can select a layout type (simple, two columns etc). We can also directly drag-and-drop boxes to change their position.

As an example see the layout below. I have selected a two-columns layout and I have put the system news on the top of the main column.

If I save this interface and get back to the main screen of the system I see the following layout. Well, you got how this works (I guess)!

But wait, we are not done yet. We can also create our own boxes with content by clicking the big + icon on the right of the layout page. Let us put some info there and drag-and-drop the new box to our interface. This will lead to something like the screen below.

As a final note we can alter the header/footer to match our needs through the same interface – just check for the “pencil” icons on the headers/footers area.

[edit] Interface consideration and accounts mapping

Ok, now that we have a first page that matches our needs let us get inside. When you login to eFront you witness that the pages include a main left sidebar that helps with the navigation. The sidebar will change the active option depending on your location inside the system and it also allows you to go to any place directly and search from a centralized location. You may close/open the sidebar to save space.

eFront is structured around three different types of users (student, professor, admin). This principal may come as an overhead for people that have worked with Moodle, for example, where it is easy to switch between admin and professor. However, the distinction in three different user-types offers a wealth of opportunities for a more customizable user experience as we will explain later. To remedy this situation eFront comes with an Account Mapping facility that allows a user to map one, two, three or more accounts for different type of users and move from one account to another with a single-click. This comes with the added benefit that you can map more than one student and more than one professor with an admin (just an example, use your imagination here…) Each user can work on a different superset of functions with a clear distinction as set below:

• Admin: Setup the system and the catalog structure. Can get global reports about the system and set users/professors for individual lesson/courses. He can also change the layout of the system, post global announcements etc. The Administrator CANNOT add directly content to lessons
• Professor: He can manipulate a number of lessons that were given to him from the admin. He can add content, create tests, create surveys, add content rules etc. On the course level he can add a certification, change lesson’s order inside the course etc. Professor can track statistics for the lesson’s users but he cannot add users directly to the lesson. Also, he cannot add new lessons or courses.
• Student: He can interact with the lessons that were assigned to him or directly get/buy lessons from the lessons catalog. He can also communicate with other users inside the system via forum, chat, personal messages and other communication mediums.

In order to create a flexible working environment I will enter the system as an administrator and I will map my account with the default professor and student. Just click on the admin avatar on top-left, go to mappings tab and add mappings for professor and student as shown below:

These options will reveal two icons on the bottom of the sidebar that allows us to move between users through a simple click. Just click on the professor or student icon to go to his interface.

[edit] Settings, settings, settings…

Let’s move to the main system settings from the relative option on admin interface. Hmmm, there are a lot of options there but the most important settings should be already filled in from the installation. If you don’t have an email address it is easy to map your gmail account with your eFront installation using the settings on the following screenshot. Note that you need to enable SSL support on your php.ini for gmail accounts to work.

For my installation I will make another major change: I will ask that each student should confirm their email account before being activated as shown below. Depending on your needs you can also ask that the admin should confirm each and every new user, you can restrict the IPs that will access the system and a wealth of more options.

[edit] Creating categories and lessons

Ok, let’s rock and roll! I will create a category for world religions and add there one lesson for each religion. Later, I will map all lessons under one concrete entity called course and attach a certification for its completion. Let us create a category. As an administrator go to categories, click on “new category” and give a category name. Do not select a parent category for now. Later you can use this option to nest as many categories as you want. Click on submit and … congrats! Your new category is at your disposal.

Next let’s go to the main menu and click on lessons option->new lesson. I will add a new lesson for Christianity and one for Induism the way is shown below. Note that I use the Enterprise edition. If you have the Community edition options like Subscription will not be visible. I give a name to the lesson and select my new category here, and click on Submit.

At a second step eFront will ask me to register immediately a few users to the lesson as shown below. Each user will by default have their basic role but you may change the user role for this specific lesson by selecting from the drop-down box. Later we will see how we can create new user-types with less permission than the default professor and student.

As soon as I have added both lessons I can logout to my main screen where one can see the new category and lessons in action.

[edit] Professor’s lesson dashboard

Great, we have successfully created one category and two lessons. Let’s get inside as a professor now to see what we can do. When you first login you are presented with a list of your lessons. Click on the Christianity lesson link to go to its Dashboard.

The professor’s lesson dashboard has many-many options. Again we won’t excessively demonstrate all of them here. Actually, I will not show you how to add content, projects and create tests or manipulate your content tree. They are extensively covered on eFront’s wiki. Here are a few links to this information:

• How to add content - http://wiki.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Content_management
• How to create tests - http://wiki.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Tests/Assesments
• How to work with projects - http://wiki.efrontlearning.net/index.php/Projects

As a lesson’s professor my first task is to decide about the characteristics of this lesson. I click on the Administrator link which gives me the previews screenshot. By clicking on options I can activate/deactivate them (you can see them turned gray when deactivated). For example, if I do not want a glossary for this lesson I can deactivate it. It is usually a good idea to deactivate all options that you won’t use to keep your environment simple. Next, I move to the layout tab (second from the left). I can drag-and-drop boxes here to decide about the exact look-and-feel of the lessons’ interface for the end-student. Don’t forget to click on Save Changes at the end!

I can always use the mapped accounts icons to see the lesson from another user’s perspective. For example, I will click on the student icon to go to his account. Note that when you are inside a lesson the system will directly go to the same lesson for the mapped user (assuming the lesson is assigned to him at the first place). The student’s lesson interface is much simpler with not much information yet. Through time it will become more complex but in general we need to keep it simple enough. I can click to the professor icon to get back to Professor Dashboard for the Christianity lesson.

[edit] Working with courses

Now that we have set-up a basic environment let us proceed to courses internals. Courses are a convenient way to bundle several lessons as one concrete entity. Let’s login as administrator and go to lessons tab to select once more the Christianity lesson. There is an option on each lesson that decides if it should be available as “standalone” or “through a course”. I am going to change to “through a course” mode for now. Note that there is an exclusive-or relationship between “standalone” and “through a course” mode – a lesson can be one of them but not both of them at the same time. I am silently doing the same for the Induism lesson. When a lesson is on the through a course mode you cannot assign users or price to it. These tasks are now part of the course creation as we will see in a moment.

Check the following series of images for the steps I have to make to create a new course (from the related option on Administrator), assign lessons to a course and users (in enterprise edition I can also assign skills that are transferred to users that complete a course).

Note that one can assign the same lesson to different courses (and effectively create different bundles of the same underlying content). Now that we have setup our course and assign a few users to it lets logout to see how it looks like now from the login page. As you can see a course looks similar to a category with lessons beneath it.

Things start to become interesting when I login as a professor now. Next to a course name that belongs to my list of lessons/courses I can see several new options.

By clicking on any of these icons I can see several tabs as presented on the following imag. Each course can have its own descriptions (tab information), an attached certification, rules about how students will view lessons (as an example you can set that Induism is available only when Christianity lesson has been completed), we can change the order of lessons in the courses list, we can schedule course availability and finally we can import/export a course (this includes all lessons of the course as a concrete entity).

[edit] Putting our course to work!

Let us devise a usage scenario here. We want a course about World religions with several (well, two for now) religions as part of the course. We want to decide about the order in which students will see the content based on the religion’s age span. This means that in our example Induism which is older than Christianity should be first. We want to ensure that the users will have to finish each lesson before proceeding (this means that somehow a lesson should be considered finished). When all lessons have been completed we want to auto-issue a certification for the student. First, we need to ensure the appropriate order of appearance for courses by using the “Order” subtab on courses options:

Then we need to make sure that a student has to finish Induism first to be able to access Christianity from the Rules tab.

Afterwards we can decide about the look-and-feel of our certification. We can create our own template but for now we will use one of the system’s templates. Click on Certificates and a page with all users and their status will appear. On the top there are options to format your certification and decide if you want to issue them manually or automatically. Check the images below for more “visual” details on this process.

One remaining issue is that in order for the course to be completed each lesson that comprises it should be completed as well. But how and when a lesson is considered completed? This is accomplished with lesson rules. As a professor select one lesson and then click on rules. There you can find Content traversing rules and Lesson completion rules. The first decide on how the user will see units (for example you can restrict access to certain unit if a test has not been completed successfully). The second test decides on when a lesson is considered completed. The simplest rule is to “See all units” – we can expand on this with several additional rules to make a completed condition as unique as we need. Don’t forget to turn “Auto completed” to Yes in this screen – otherwise you will have manually to set the lesson completed later.

Let’s see how the lesson looks-like from a student’s perspective. At the beginning, when the user has not completed any lesson, he cannot access the Christianity lesson as shown below.

Then, when the user finishes the first lesson he is granted access to the second one.

When the student completes both lessons the course is considered completed and a certification is issued that he can see and download.

By clicking on the certification icon the user can see his certification, download or print it.

[edit] Extending the system’s functionality

eFront uses modules as a convenient way to extend its functionality. You can find a list of officially supported modules at:

http://www.efrontlearning.net/download/modules.html

For my environment I will use two modules: the Links module and the DimDim module. The first module allows to add external links to the lesson’s dashboard and the DimDim module allows to use eFront with the DimDim videoconferencing tool. There is a great variety of modules to select from. We first need to download the modules from the above link. Then login as administrator, go to modules option and use the install module option to upload the modules. You should end-up to a screen similar with the following one:

Depending on the module’s functionality it can become part of the Administrator, Professor or Student pages (or any combination of the above). For example, the DimDim module has an option to select the Dimdim server that resides on the Administrator’s dashboard.

Let’s login as a professor. We select the Christianity lesson and click on Administration. We can see now the two new options for the Links and the Conferences.

The newly activated modules will be visible on both professor and student dashboard for this lesson. Note that the professor may use the Administration->Layout option to decide about the default position of different boxes on student’s dashboard.

[edit] More things to check

This was a short introduction to the wealth of functionality offered by eFront. Feel free to experiment with the Community edition and discover small treasures. Don’t forget that you can get a lot of help by visiting the system’s forum at:

http://forum.efrontlearning.net

If you are interested in advanced functionality like payments support, skill-gap analysis, skills management, branch management then you might check as well the Enterprise edition of eFront that offers a robust solution for Enterprises and Educational institutes:

http://www.efrontlearning.net/product/efront-enterprise.html