Instruction Designer
Instruction Designer is the next big project in the ELMS family. Instruction Designer's goal is to be able to visually store and manage the flow of instruction semester to semester, section to section, and instructor to instructor. The project's philosophy is that by separating structure of instruction from the content of instruction we can more rapidly reconfigure and reuse course materials. You'll probably have to use the Instruction Designer to really understand what it's attempting to accomplish (unless you're an instructional designer and then it should be pretty clear...I hope).
This establishes a content type which is essentially a syllabus. After entering all pertainent information to convey to students about a course, you then use the technology powering the outline designer to structure how you want your course to flow. In this flow you structure containers (such as Units, Lessons, Weeks of instructure, how ever you want to break it up) and then fill them with instructional activities for the students to complete. Some examples of activities could be:
* Go read chapter 3 in the text
* Go read e-text chapter 1 (which could do a node reference to outline designer generated material)
* Review your review packet
* Submit Assignment 5
You can also associate dates to both activities and containers (example container- Unit 1: Big Cities (10/10 - 11/10) ). You can also give point values and link things to overarching grade categories. This can then be used to automatically calculate things like % of student's grade that will be made up of Quizzes. Example: Unit 1 Quiz - 10/21 - 100 points. This can then be aggregated back into the grade category of Quiz so that all things of type quiz will show up as an overview table with the 100 points from this instructional activity factored in.
Unfortunately until I get screenshots and screencasts of how this will operate it's very hard to describe. Just imagine a module that creates a content type that acts as a course's syllabus. This syllabus then can be translated directly into the structuring of the course you are offering. It will also be able to export your syllabus straight into book navigation, a PDF file, or html (piggybacking the HTML export module).