Release 3.6.3
From EFrontWiki
eFront 3.6.3 introduces several new components, usability and functionality adjustments and scalability improvements.
The main new components are the Course Instances, the Feedback and the Curriculum. Functionality adjustments can be found on Course catalog and the Enterprise Extensions. Below you can find a detailed description of the major differences in this eFront release.
Contents |
[edit] Course instances
This version introduces a shift from a Lesson-centric to a Course-centric eFront. We have made several interface and language changes to facilitate this move with minimum impact on upgrades. We anticipate that the transition will be completed on the next few incremental versions. These modifications are part of eFront Educational and eFront Enterprise. The Community and Community++ users will not witness many differences on the course infrastructure.
The introduction of Course-instances combined with the introduction of Curriculum brings some very important new options for organizing the learning material.
A Course-instance is a type of sub-course tightly connected with the initial course. When you create a Course-instance it duplicates its father course. At a second step you can customize its name and behavior. A Course-instance can share the same lessons with its father, have unique instances of the lessons or have a different set of lessons all together.
Consider a scenario in which you have a school with a physics course (which includes several lessons), separated in 4 different classrooms. Each classroom has its own teacher(s) and students. Previously you had to create 4 different courses to achieve this effect. Furthermore, each lesson inside the course was always on shared mode - which means that it did not explicitly belong to any course and changes that happened to a lesson were shared with all courses that included it.
Course-instances come to remedy this situation. You can now create a course with 4 different instances and you can assign the same lessons to each one of them in unique mode. Different sets of students/professors can be assigned to each instance. Unique lessons are now linked to their course and can be modified without altering the initial lesson. Furthermore, when someone completes a Course-instance he/she completes the main course as well.
When you create a course you can decide if a lesson is in shared or unique mode.
The shared mode is the current eFront mode - no surprises here. The unique mode is brand new and works as follows:
- It creates a new invisible lesson and attaches it to the course
- It copies the content from the initial lesson to the new lesson
- For efficiency reasons it "shares" the folder between the new and the old lesson. If this was not the case then you would witness enormous loss of storage from this process. However, since all unique' lessons that derive from an initial lesson share the same files if someone deletes a file then everyone will notice the difference. Still, you can assign different users to the new lesson and change the order or the units-content without interfering with the original lesson.
For more info on these modifications check Course Instances.
[edit] Feedback
The Feedback is a survey-like tool, that allows the professor to get feedback from lesson users. In contrast with the current Survey option, a Feedback can become part of the lesson's tree and the professor can create lesson completion rules based on it or run reports against it. For more info check the wiki article about Feedback.
[edit] Curriculum
A Curriculum bundles several courses into a single learning topic to provide a complete set of related courses, often covering common topics. Put simply, Curriculum is to courses, what courses are to lessons. For more info check the wiki article about Curriculum.
[edit] Enterprise Extensions
Based on the needs and feedback from end-users we added a few options to better control the behavior of Enterprise extensions and make it a better fit for a variety or real world needs. These options are available from admin->settings->Enterprise settings as depicted below:
 Granulating Enterprise functionality |
[edit] Groups and filtering
This release bridges groups with the find-users and reports options. You can now search for users that fulfill certain criteria (even from additional registration fields) and add them directly to a group. Furthermore, when you create reports for lessons or courses you can filter the results based on a group.
[edit] Scalability improvements
With this version we make an important transition from language-based filtering to database-based filtering for handling data. With language-based filtering, data was fetched from the database in raw format and the filtering was done afterward. This mode of working had certain advantages, mainly simplicity of use, and it was the preferred method of working until now. Unfortunately, when we grew the number of users to several thousands and the number of lessons to several hundreds we witnessed slow performance. Thus, we opted to transfer much of the logic to the database layer. Stress testing with several thousand of users and thousand of lessons have shown tremendous improvements on speed and responsiveness with this new model. This is an ongoing process that we anticipate will be completed during the next few builds.
[edit] Other usability and functionality improvements
- A feed on admin dashboard for news and security announcements
- Maintenance options for prune logs
- Modifications on how a lesson/course is reset
- New option to user-catalog to show only non-completed lesson
- New option on settings->appearance to make the user's dashboard the main system screen upon user login
- New option on settings->appearance to use the latest edition of tiny mce (3.3.3)
- Security improvements
 Selecting the main user page after login |
