Dear ETUDES Alliance Partner:

I am en route to the University of Toronto for a developers' meeting. The flight
is a welcome break from a very busy schedule in the last two months and an
opportunity to reflect and send you an overdue update.
MELETE--AUTHORING TOOL FOR ETUDES-NG
We have made great progress on the design of an authoring tool for Etudes-NG,
Melete. We have completed the functional requirements document (uploaded in
private forum) and are in the process of developing mock-up designs for the user
interface of the tool. I should be able to share with you what the tool will
look like late next week. Melete is basically the "Classroom" area of Etudes
where faculty can upload, link to, and author content. Currently, Sakai allows
JUST for file uploads. You will recognize the functionality as we are trying to
preserve the controls of ETUDES that faculty rely on so that the transition is
smooth and the learning curve close to zero. We are polishing the interface and
are bringing in some additional functionality, such as import/export of modules
or the entire course content, save modules or course to pdf, and add a built-in
syllabus and other templates to help faculty with consistent presentation format
of lessons.

We will be borrowing from the work of U Toronto and will add an accessibility
checker.

WYSIWYG EDITOR
We spent quite a bit of time reviewing browser-based WYSIWYG editors to
integrate with Melete so that faculty can create nicely formatted content online
without needing to know html. Although the community would like us to stick with
open source editors, there are none that are powerful. I lean toward integrating
a robust commercial WYSIWYG editor instead. This is a benefit of our centralized
support model--we'll cover the costs for all alliance members (one fee).
Features to expect in such an editor include: multilingual spell-checking,
international language support, drag/drop/paste from Word, ADA compliance, and a
MathML equation editor. A complete list of the editor features is posted in our
forum. I see this as a great opportunity to respond to foreign language and math
instructors whose needs are not met with Etudes or other tools. Lots to figure
out with licensing and integration, but that's what weld like to have in the
tool.

PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT & PILOT
Our developers have installed the Sakai Public Release Candidate 2 (RC2)
successfully and are in the process of evaluating the underlying technologies.
This early release does NOT have some of the tools that faculty need, such as
testing and a gradebook. The latter are expected to be integrated in the
November Sakai 1.5 release. We hope to integrate an early release of the
authoring tool to our local ETUDES-NG implementation in December. Because key
pieces are not integrated yet, we are postponing the setup of a production
environment and pilots until the spring term. I believe it is important that
faculty see a fully-featured product that will excite them and will make
migrating to. NG highly desirable. A first-rate user experience is a must.

MIGRATION TOOLS & USER TRAINING
Once we are finished with the design phase and have defined the use cases for
the authoring tool (another twenty days) and the developers are "heads-down"
coding, I will be hiring one more developer to start working on migration
utilities. By mid-fall, we'll start developing training resources on the
authoring tool.

PRIVATE FORUM
The functional requirements for the authoring tool and the desired features for
a WYSIWYG editor have been posted in the forum. Again, the design mockups for
Melete will be posted in the forum within the next ten days. Please feel free to
register and/or direct faculty there to stay informed and review the documents.
They will need to register using their college email address to receive an
alliance forum user account.

See: http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/cgi/forums/etudes2/dcboard.cgi?az=login
<http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/cgi/forums/etudes2/dcboard.cgi?az=login>

Please feel free to contract me should you have any questions.

Vivian "Vivie" Sinou
Dean, Distance & Mediated Learning
Foothill College