Welcome to STEM4youth Documentation’s documentation!

Contents

Note

You may download source for this documentation here.

If a consortium partner is familiar with GIT/bitbucket and restructuredtext they are more than welcome to submit Pull Requests to the documentation.

Terms dictionary

OLCMS
stands for Open Learning Content Management System.
Resource
Single thing that is submitted to OLCMS, resources can contain multiple files.

Use cases

Educators

Adam — innovative teacher from Poland

Adam is a Physics teacher who teaches at a local high school, he wants his lessons to be as attractive as possible, and also wants to encourage as many students to STEM fields as possible.

He uses materials provided by the STEM4youth project, to enhance his lessons:

  • He displays movies as a part of his presentations.
  • He uses tests developed in the project, as a part of homework assignments.
  • He performs remote laboratory experiments to show physical phenomena to students.
What is important for Adam

  1. He needs stability — if he needs to perform the experiment during the lesson — this experiment needs to be online. There is not so many hours in the Physics curriculum in Poland, so every interruption will be painful.

  2. He needs to be able to download or embed various materials. He should be able to present those materials during the lessons, even if there is no Internet connection in the classroom.

  3. Adam would like to be able to structure resources in linear fashion, e.g. after displaying video about photoelectric effect, he’d like to show students some example test questions, and after perform experiment on-line. This structuring should be doable also outside of LMS context.

  4. During the lessons he needs to be in control what is displayed right now, students might have problems with some concepts — which he might need to explain in depth — rescheduling some contents.

    He really doesn’t need an LMS to control order in which content is given. He absolutely needs to be able to skip over content — LMS that strictly enforces pre-requisites is totally unacceptable.

  5. Sometime Adam needs to make a small adjustment to the materials — they should be editable.

  6. Materials for students need to be printable, in Adam’s school there is only a single classroom with computers, which is spoken for most of the times.

Problems with this user story

None known

Astero — STEM teacher in Greece

Astero has a four year degree in Physics. She has a good knowledge of Mathematics and some experience with computing. She doesn’t have much time to prepare for an innovative lesson neither sufficient freedom to deviate from the curriculum. Her lessons usually have a linear structure, but she also has to use her improvisation skills since things do not always work as planned.

Astero is using the STEM4youth project material to make her lesson more fancy:

  • She wants to have online and offline access to the repository material.
  • She wants to be able to select from the available material (video, simulations, worksheets etc.) in the platform in order to integrate it to her ordinary lesson.
  • Her lessons usually have a linear structure, but she also has to use her improvisation skills since things do not always work as planned.
What is important for Astero
  • She teaches in many schools with different equipment, she needs to know:
    1. Which materials are compatible with the installed OS (Windows XP/7/8/10, Linux)
    2. How to use the material in the given OS (if some setup is necessary)
  • She’d like to have pedagogical guidelines along with the content.
Brian — local activist and STEM enthusiast

Brian is leading a local institution devoted to education of children (let’s say Kids club in a local Culture Centre). His lessons are not obligatory — so they need to be super attractive.

He is focused on developing hands-on activities, and he’d like to use one of the activities prepared in the STEM4youth project. His work in the Culture Centre is either voluntary, or not his main activity — he won’t be able to spend too much time preparing.

What is important for Brian
  • He can easily order everything needed for the hands-on activities, if something is not available in typical supermarket/general store he either gets a list of outlets in Europe, or a internet shop address.
  • Parts are cheap.
  • He has guidelines for whole hands on activity.
Cecilia — teacher

Cecilia is a maths teacher in an Arts high-school, she has less hours for Maths than typical schools, moreover here pupils are less interested than average in the matter.

Typically only interest in Maths is in the final year of high school, where students start to be concerned with the final exams, where math is obligatory. However she still has not enough hours to properly review whole curriculum. She’d like to have a tool which allows students to review several parts of the curriculum, independently on their own pace — she’d like to direct them to a webpage, and give some pointers on what to learn.

What is important for Cecilia
  • She doesn’t want to interact with the platform, she is extremely busy.
  • Whole experience for students should be canned — no help from her should be neccessary.
Problems with this user story

If we implement this story for a given course:

  • Exercises would need to be prepared in a special format (like GIFT)
  • Possibly they would be then converted to .pdf for printing (if we want it!).
  • LMS needs login functionality for students.
Vangelis — a retiring teacher

Vangelis is an old teacher — he still cares deeply about his students, so he tries to use whatever best materials are necessary, however due to his digital exclusion has only limited knowledge of IT. He doesn’t know what is “Google +” and doesn’t use “Facebook”. He follows old fashioned teaching methods, but he likes to introduce some innovative elements in his lesson. He teaches Mathematics. Vangelis doesn’t speak English.

Vangelis is using content from the STEM4youth project in order to be in touch with new developments in pedagogical methods and tools. He believes that by integrating content he will make his lessons more attractive and interesting to his technologically informed students.

  • Vangelis is more familiar with printed material.
  • Vangelis wants the content to be easily integrated to his old fashioned teaching.
  • Vangelis has limited time within each lesson available for innovative content.
What is important for Vangelis
  • Login should be unnecessary to download materials from repository.
  • OLCMS should allow downloading the materials in a easy to use formats.
  • Vangelis wants any content to be compatible with Windows because it is the only OS he is familiarized with.
  • Vangelis wants the software content not to need any third party installation or preferably any installation at all
  • Vangelis needs the content to be of a short duration.
  • Vangelis wants to be able to browse easily the content at the OLCMS
Zuzanna — innovative teacher from Poland (homework part)

Zuzanna is a Physics teacher who teaches at a local high school. Her students, although they are interested in subject, don’t seem to work hard in home on Physics. This is mostly due to following factors:

  • In Poland Physics is not obligatory on final exams (Maths is), and students are more concerned with obligatory subjects.
  • Students have attention span problems — they have only a single hour of Physics in the week so it’s easy to forget.
  • Some student’s are lazy and just copy homework from others before the lesson
  • Zuzanna has no time to check everybody’s homework all the time.

Zuzanna is also a very busy person — she teaches in three schools. She would like to give more interesting homework, but she has no time to prepare it — so she usually asks students to do some problems from the problem book.

What is important for Zuzanna
  • She’d like to have an external system in which he would schedule homework for his students.
  • Homework should be graded automatically.
  • Each student should see slightly different questions.
Problems with this user story

The same as for Cecilia.

Grace — teacher that stumbles upon OLCMS

Grace was searching the Internet for materials she might use for her lesson.

We want her to:

  • Know what OLCMS is.
  • Be able to search OLCMS for contents.
  • When she find matierials in OLCMS, she knows how to use them.

All above scenarios should be fulfilled when search engine redirects Grace to:

  • OLCMS landing page
  • OLCMS search result page
  • OLCMS page for a resource.
HawkBot — search engine bot indexing OLCMS

Hawkbot is a search index bot that indexes OLCMS.

We want HawkBot to be able to properly index OLCMS, giving this page a high ranking.

Consortium members

Annemarie — IT specialist

Annemarie is an IT specialist, she works with the pedagogy team to prepare a set of interactive exercises that the student’s use.

She needs to have specs for the content that will allow:

  1. Seamless integration with OLCMS.
  2. Allow students to be graded.
Bertram — video specialist

Bertram is a video specialist responsible for recording and subtitling the video.

Bertram needs to have:

  • Defined video format;
  • Defined subtitle format;
Cedric — project manager

Cedric is a project manager, he is concerned that we signed keeping project output on-line for two years after the project finishes. He wants almost all products to be hosted on OLCMS — this way if we keep OLCMS on-line we will fulfill our promises.

Derrick — course manager

Derrick is a person uploading course materials to OLCMS. He needs to upload multiple versions of the matersals in two languages, he wants this process to be as organized as possible.

He has following requirements:

  • Resources should be editable — user with proper permissions should be able to change resources at will.
  • Each resource should have language versions. Derrick wants to have as few resources as possible — it is easier to upload two changed language versions for a resource, than a upload two separate resources.
  • For each part of the resource we should display change date, and possibly change history.

Students

Alan

He has low technical skills, if he has to access materials in the repository he shouldn’t have to log in.

Brina

Brina is a high school student that, due to financial constraints doesn’t own a computer. She however owns a smartphone that come “free” with her carrier plan.

What is important for Brina
  • Most of the materials should be available (in one way or the other) on low resolution smart-phone screen, using a typical smartphone OS (e.g. Android).
Problems with this user story

All documents accessible on the smartphone:

  • Should be in a format accessible on a smartphone (definetely not MS WORD)
  • Should be in a format that adapts to screen size (not .pdf).
  • Even if she has PC computer — with MS Windows system, she might not have MS Word license — so we should rely on formats that have freely available viewers.
Calvin — student who founds this page using search

This scenario is similar to Grace — user enters OLCMS from search engine, but this time we want him to:

  • Get best/highlighted content/most engaging content and then use it.

Unrelated third parties

Alexis

Alexis is a developer working on a related project, he is trying to discover landscape of OER repositories and stumbles upon our site.

He should immediately know that this site is based on open-source software and know that he is welcome to fork and extend it.

Content formats

For now we have more questions than answers.

General notes

Documents need to (also) in editable format. If you upload .pdf please upload whatever format was used to generate the .pdf.

Where should we put metadata? Either metadata should be a part of OLCMS data model, or part of uploaded resources.

This is a list of criteria for a content to be “Travelling Well” created as a part of another EC project.

Advice how to prepare each format

Advices how to prepare content (formats and graphical presentation)

Printable documents

TBD

  • Experiments recipe (lots of metadata)
Requirements
  • Format must be editable, or an editable version must be uploaded along with .pdf.

Video

TBD

Requirements

We definetely should have a single repository for video files, either created in-house or use some generic solution like YouTube or Vimeo. Following features are considered to be essential:

  • Support for subtitles
  • Support for multiple subtitle tracks
  • Support for multiple audio tracks
  • Ad-free experience for our students (which excludes free versions of Youtube and Vimeo)
  • Videos should be downloadable — as Internet is not avilable in every classroom by default (This fuliflls Adam’s),
  • Video watermarks (TBD)
Open questions
  • Quiz formats
  • What codecs will be a problem on WIndoes and what will not.
Requirements for produced videos
  • Videos should be split to 5-10min parts
  • Videos should be interleaved with quizzes that check understanding and keep student attention.

Interactive content (games, interactive experiments)

TBD

  • Pdfs (interactive?)

We

Remote laboratories

TBD

Questionaires // Quizzes

I would envision these quizzes would be both downloadable and answerable online.

Things TBD

  • How to tackle content that is intended to be consumed both on-line and in print (actually most of the contents...)? On line content should adapt to screen size, which .pdf doesn’t do, on the other hand .pdf is one of the format that reliably prints itself.

Functionalities of the repository

All of this is still TBD!

Main entity in the system will be a “resource”, which represents a single content item, that comprises of many files. For example resource might contain:

  • Youtube link to a video;
  • Downloadable video version;
  • Subtitles for the downloadable video in Polish;
  • Subtitles for the downloadable video in English;

Requirements

  • We might store resources that contain multiple files;
  • One of these files will be “default” (in this case youtube link).
  • These files will be rendered (youtube links will embed to iframe, pdfs will be rendered using browser)
  • Metadata is extracted from files, but users can add their own (predefined) metadata.
  • Files in resources can be overriden and versioned.
  • You can filter files in resource using language tags.
  • (Stretch goal) There should be an easy way for an user to “fork” materials — user will get a copy of a resource which he might edit to his needs.
  • Multilanguage versions.
  • Is integrated with S3 service or analogous. S3 service is a blob store as a service — basically you upload static files there, and they are served from there. Backups, consistency, availability and handling transfer spikes is on their side. .

Requirements

Warning

Not all features written in this document will be implemented, and this document doesn’t contain any hard commitments.

Note

Missing requirements:

  • Everyone may submit their own materials;
  • Enable users to up-vote materials;

Basic requirements

  • We have a platform where partners (and third-parties) can upload content items.
  • These content items may be structured in a linear fashion.
  • Content types for these content items are TBD.
  • Teachers can download and remix materials
  • Students can participate in courses
  • Materials are cloneable/remixable by third-parties

OLCMS requirements

System is stable

System works reliably, and the urls are stable.

This addresses Adam’s story.

Content is downloadable

Content types (for which it makes sense) are downloadable.

Teacher should be able to download materials, for most material types:

  • Documents/textual content;
  • Quizzes, tests;
  • Videos;

This addresses Adam’s story.

Teacher is in control of content scheduling

When teacher is presenting the contents in class, he is in control over scheduling — he might need to skip some parts and/or focus on others.

He absolutely needs to be able to skip over content — LMS that strifctly enforces pre-requisites is totally unacceptable.

This addresses Adam’s story.

LMS part

System should contain typical LMS part that allows students to review material on their own. Teacher would point student to LMS and then student could take course on their own

This addresses Cecilia’s story.

System contains homeworks that are gradable, teacher can assess student performance
This addresses Elize’s story.
Content is browseable and searchable without login
This addresses Daryl’s, and Alan’s.
User is able to re-use content in way he is used to

Content is split in a small parts and user can download it and use it in whatever way he is comfortable with.

Videos can be downloaded and embedded in presentations, pdfs can be printed,

This addresses Daryl’s story and Vangelis.

OLCMS is translatable to many languages

We can translate OLCMS to different languages.

We will try to translate it to as many languages as feasible.

This addresses Fabio’s and Vangelis story.

OLCMS auto detects user’s language and tries to display content’s in this language
This addresses Fabio’s and Vangelis story.
User is able to switch this language
This addresses Fabio’s and Vangelis story.
OLCMS allows user to browse resources in other languages than his native.
This addresses Fabio’s story.
OLCMS role is obvious even for users that found it via the search engine

User who arrives at OLCMS is able to quickly understand that:

  • He browses a repository of teaching materials;
  • He can search for more materials;

This addresses Grace’s story.

User is informed on a Resource page what he might do with the resource

For example, when browsing Video resource, he should be informed that he might either show the video (and he gets link to Youtube) or he might download the video for off-line viewing.

This addresses Grace’s story.

OLCMS is SEO friendly
This addresses HawkBot’s story.
Users should be able to structure materials

User should be able to structure materials in a linear fashion, to create “lessons” from individual content pieces.

This addresses Adam’s story.

Users should be able to edit materials on platform

If an instructor needs to change given content piece he might do so in a “forking” manner: that is — he creates a copy of the resource which me might edit.

This addresses Adam’s story.

Materials should contain metadata
To a possible extend metadata should be extracted from the uploaded contents. But content editor should be able to add his own metadata.

Content formats

Content should be uploaded in editable format

Content’s should be uploaded in editable formats, programs that can be used to edit uploaded materials ideally should be free and open source.

Users should be able to “just” use content’s in a way they are used to.

This fulfills Adam’s and Vangelis.

User should be able to view materials in free (and, ideally, open-source software)

Contents should be playable on variety of OSes and devices.

This fulfills Brina’s.

Materials should be playable without installing new software

This fulfills Brina’s and and Vangelis.

We should strive to use formats that have pre-installed players :

  • We can assume that recent version of Chrome/Firefox browser is installed everywhere.
  • Probably the same for Adobe Reader (for MS Windows systems)
  • We can assume users will be able to play videos.
Printable documents should be uploaded in `.pdf`

But editable version (if one exists) should be uploaded alongside.

This fulfills Brina’s, Adam’s.

Formats designed for web should adapt to screen size
This fulfills Brina’s

Installation instructions are available

For each content format installation instructions are available for every platform that supports that format.

This addresses Astero story.

Pedagogical instructions are available

For each resource we also give pedagogical instructions.

Course Guidelines

Use of cheap and available materials

If Instructor needs to buy some expendable materials for classes he should need to use cheap and available materials.

Instructions should contain shops (including online shops) where he might buy the materials.

This addresses Brian’s story.

Uploaded content should be splitted in small chunks

Some teachers will have very limited time for innovation, we should attempt to produce contents that is splitted in small parts:

  • Maximal duration for playing the content should be 15minutes.
  • All reusable parts should be separated.

This addresses Vangelis story.

Materials should be printable

Content types (for which it makes sense) are printable.

This addresses Adam’s and Vangelis story.

Uploaded materials should have pedagogical guidelines

This addresses Astero story.

Misc requirements

Link to our github/gitlab/bitbucket profile is on the footer of every page.

Open problems

Printability vs. adaptability

Ideally materials generated by partners should both look good when printed, and be adaptable to various screen size.

There is no single format that fulfills both these requirements (.pdf is good for printing, and .html or .epub are good at adapting to screen sized).

Converting between these formats is not an easy thing to do.

Technical requirements

Use storage as a service solution
I’d rather not have to worry about backing up the resources too much.

Trial plan in Poland (WUT)

Status of this document

This is not a normative document — I just asked our pedagogy team on how they want to perform the trials, to share with this with the partners.

How will trials in Poland look like

We want teachers to use our materials in their schools.

For Polish teachers/schools using setting up the trails remotely is not feasible, we need to travel to school (presumably multiple times).

On first visit we prepare a demonstration lesson — that is a lesson that is conducted by our staff entirely. Then on second visit we may ask teacher to perform such a lesson themselves and get the evaluation forms filled. Teacher needs to “see” our tools in action before he starts using them themselves.

Then we invite the school to visit WUT.

Problem points

  1. Infrastructure is sketchy. We might have very different levels of technical capabilities for staff in our schools. Usually students are more capable than teachers though.

    One needs to book some time to install everything, and be prepared for surprises, we tried asking school staff to prepare computers (install some software) but it was rarely done.

  2. Visiting the school is totally required. without it most probably they won’t use the software.

  3. Teacher training is important, but it doing it remotely is impractical in Poland.

School IT infrastructure

Does assumption that every classroom has at least a single computer is valid in every classroom;

Differs from country to country. In some countries it can be assumed in some other do not.

Mostly we should go with: “If needed teacher will be able to get one laptop for classroom”.

Does this computer have broadband Internet.

Connection should be present.

However materials should be downloadable nevertheless.

Does your schools have classrooms with computers on every student;

There are IT classrooms.

Does assumption that every classroom has a computer for every student;

Not really.

What OS-es school uses. Is this MS Windows or Linux.

Mostly Windows, but there are a lot of Linux in Greece.

Does household of every student contains a PC-Computer

Not really. Often it is the case, but not always.

If they do not own a computer, do they own another computing device: Tablet, Smartphone?

Often they do. We should make everything work on smart-phone.

Does school in your country use any LMS software to deliver contents or tests?

If they use something, they use Moodle.

OLCMS manual

Step 1: Log in

Go to page: https://olcms.stem4youth.pl/ and click Sign In link. Fill your user and password.

Note

Right now it is recommended that you use log-in per institution. OLCMS does not store personally identifiable information, so personal log-ins are unnecessary right now.

_images/sign-in-small.png

Sign in

Step 2: Add some content item

To add new content click Content Item and then Add. Then you need to fill the following:

  • type — there is only one content item type: “basic”, we will add “movie”, “quiz”, “course” at a later date.
  • title — title of content item.
  • author — authors of your content

Rest of fields are optional, however you might want to take special care to following:

  • license — as it will legally mean that your content has following license.
  • domains — will be used to enable teacher to filter by e.g. age group.

Click save, and you are done.]

Note

There is a lot of information to fill (and there will be more!), all this was agreed in Ljubljana, however if you feel this is excessive, let us know and we’ll priorize!

_images/start.png

Add Content Item button (visible for logged-in users)

_images/add-content-item.png

Form for adding content item

_images/content-item-view.png

Created content item.

Step 3: Add some resources

Right now there is no content in your content item. To add things your teacher will be able to download you can add resources. Click on Add resource button and select appropriate resource type.

Right now you can attach:

  • Files — up to 3GB in size.
  • Links
  • Documents — that are written in provided editor. These documents can be downloaded as html files, but we will add branded pdf files as we go.
Attaching files

Click on Add resource button and select appropriate resource type. Fill in file details and click Submit, then select file to attach and click Submit, wait until dialog closes.

Attaching documents

Click on Add resource button and select appropriate resource type. Fill in file document and click Submit, then fill in the document. If your document is long you are welcome to use: “distraction free mode”.

In any case your work is saved locally in your browser, and sent to server when you click safe.

Step 4: Searching for documents

Your document will be searchable after 6 minutes from being saved.

Attaching videos

Right now you can attach single movie to a Content Item of type Video (if you need more please let us know — if you need more — when we implement Course Feature you’ll be able to use this to have multiple videos).

To attach a video add a resource of type “Video”. Your video will be uploaded automatically to youtube channel, upload is done in background, so it might take a while, when video is uploaded you’ll see YouTube icon in the resource.

If anything goes wrong with the video, I’ll get an email, which will enable me to re-upload the video and fix any errors.

Questionnaires

Trial questions

Content types

What kinds of contents you wish to provide (movies, exercises, games, lecture texts, presentations etc.) to our repository. For each type of content (presentation, exercise etc), please provide in what format will it be provided, for example:

  1. For lectures will it be: OpenOffice documents, MS Word files or PDF?
  2. For movies what format will movie be in: mpg, ogv, or will it be posted to youtube, etc.
  3. Exercises will it be pen and paper exercise, or will it be a interactive application that performs grading?
  4. Some of the contents will need to be translated by third parties eg. to perform trials, how will you facilitate this.
  5. Will your content work on non-computer device (tabled, smart phone).

Please treat above questions as an example ones. Feel free to give me as much information as necessary.

Content consumption by schools

How, do you envision, this content will be consumed by high-schools in your country? Here are some guiding examples to what I’d like to know:

  • Will teachers install some third party software (eg. moodle) to deliver the exercise, or will it be just plain old pen and paper?
  • Will they use movies you provide as part of their presentations? Will they use your movie when presenting some phenomenon?
  • Will your educational games be played in classroom, or in home — will this game grade students?
  • How your content will be consumed by students?
  • Will individual pieces of content (movies, games, exercises) be assembled to larger pieces: whole lessons, fragments of curricula or whole curricula? Will these assembly be done by you, or do you intend to allow teachers to do this easily

Please treat above questions as an example ones. Feel free to give me as much information as necessary.

How will the trial be performed?

  1. Do you wish to engage schools in your country?
  2. Does trial require teacher training? How it will it be performed? Will the training be performed on-line, or will trainers need to meet with the teachers.
  3. Will educators/representatives from your institution be present in the schools?
  4. Does the trial involve shipping physical goods (experiment sets)?
  5. Do you wish to perform trials in science fairs (science festivals)?
  6. How will online/interactive content (you produce) be used in trials in schools?
  7. How will online/interactive content be used in trials outside schools (e.g. in science fairs)?

Please treat above questions as an example ones. Feel free to give me as much information as necessary.

Schools in your country

  1. Does assumption that every classroom has at least a single computer is valid in every classroom; Does this computer have broadband Internet.
  2. Does your schools have classrooms with computers on every student;
  3. Does assumption that every classroom has a computer for every student;
  4. What OS-es school uses. Is this MS Windows or Linux.
  5. Does household of every student contains a PC-Computer
  6. If they do not own a computer, do they own another computing device: Tablet, Smartphone?
  7. Does school in your country use any LMS software to deliver contents or tests? If so what software they typically use. For example: in Poland they use Moodle.