Difference between revisions of "Specifications"
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| + | OPOSSEM, the Online Portal of Social Science Education in Methodology, is an online portal to facilitate sharing of various resources for teaching social science research methods (particularly statistical methods) among educators in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate settings. Little educational material is freely available to serve the needs of basic research methods courses in the social sciences, particularly political science. The creation of problem sets and lecture notes is time-intensive, and methods courses requiring such preparation are becoming more widespread across all types of institutions. This project seeks to reduce these start-up costs and enhance methods instruction by providing an online space in which instructors can share materials and information. Community members are able to post to the discussion forum, share teaching materials (syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, or working papers on teaching research methods), suggest external resources (online data source, resources for students or instructors, or published research on teaching research methods), or rate community content. | ||
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| + | The proposed wiki-based, online textbook project responds to two needs. First, as suggested above, the range of textbook options for instructors of undergraduate research methods is quite limited. Instructors must take most textbooks as all or nothing propositions, without having flexibility to adjust content to their particular course’s learning objectives. The poor fit between the available texts and the learning objectives creates situations where students struggle not only to learn new quantitative methods that are unfamiliar and intimidating to them but must do so with examples that are not clearly related to their own political science or backgrounds. Student learning would be enhanced were they to have access to content that more clearly linked the research methods to the theories and approaches they learn in other political science class and to their own experiences. | ||
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| + | Second, research methods textbooks are quite expensive for students, even though the core content (i.e., the equations, methods) in the text changes little from edition to edition. Compared to other textbooks in political science, research methods texts, with the costs of typesetting equations and the sometimes extensive use of figures, are often at least 50% more expensive for students. This creates a burden for students with limited resources, who cannot easily afford such texts. | ||
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| + | The wiki-based textbook project will address both of these needs by enabling instructors to design a custom textbook option from the wiki-based content that will suit their particular course and to provide that textbook to their students in either Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format or as a hardcopy distributed through their university bookstore at significantly reduced cost. However, before this is possible, the MediaWiki site hosting the textbook content must be developed and customized. | ||
=Wiki Content= | =Wiki Content= | ||
Revision as of 09:03, 22 February 2012
This page lists the proposed specifications for the development of the OPOSSEM wiki.
Contents
Wiki Objectives
OPOSSEM, the Online Portal of Social Science Education in Methodology, is an online portal to facilitate sharing of various resources for teaching social science research methods (particularly statistical methods) among educators in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate settings. Little educational material is freely available to serve the needs of basic research methods courses in the social sciences, particularly political science. The creation of problem sets and lecture notes is time-intensive, and methods courses requiring such preparation are becoming more widespread across all types of institutions. This project seeks to reduce these start-up costs and enhance methods instruction by providing an online space in which instructors can share materials and information. Community members are able to post to the discussion forum, share teaching materials (syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, or working papers on teaching research methods), suggest external resources (online data source, resources for students or instructors, or published research on teaching research methods), or rate community content.
The proposed wiki-based, online textbook project responds to two needs. First, as suggested above, the range of textbook options for instructors of undergraduate research methods is quite limited. Instructors must take most textbooks as all or nothing propositions, without having flexibility to adjust content to their particular course’s learning objectives. The poor fit between the available texts and the learning objectives creates situations where students struggle not only to learn new quantitative methods that are unfamiliar and intimidating to them but must do so with examples that are not clearly related to their own political science or backgrounds. Student learning would be enhanced were they to have access to content that more clearly linked the research methods to the theories and approaches they learn in other political science class and to their own experiences.
Second, research methods textbooks are quite expensive for students, even though the core content (i.e., the equations, methods) in the text changes little from edition to edition. Compared to other textbooks in political science, research methods texts, with the costs of typesetting equations and the sometimes extensive use of figures, are often at least 50% more expensive for students. This creates a burden for students with limited resources, who cannot easily afford such texts.
The wiki-based textbook project will address both of these needs by enabling instructors to design a custom textbook option from the wiki-based content that will suit their particular course and to provide that textbook to their students in either Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format or as a hardcopy distributed through their university bookstore at significantly reduced cost. However, before this is possible, the MediaWiki site hosting the textbook content must be developed and customized.
Wiki Content
Wiki Functional Requirements and Features
Optimization and security
The site must be optimized to minimize server calls and facilitate fast page loading. The site must be secure.
Single-sign-on (SSO)
The site must implement single-sign-on using cookies (not LDAP, not OpenID, not Shibboleth, etc.) with our existing Drupal site (opossem.org), using Bakery or another similar tool. Users will sign-on only through the Drupal site (opossem.org, master) and be redirected to the Wiki (wiki.opossem.org, slave). Users will not be allowed to modify their user name or password from within the wiki, and this function should be disabled in the wiki. Any changes must be made on the Drupal site and then propagated to the Wiki site in a true "sync." That is, changes to the user name, email, or password on the Drupal site must be updated to the Wiki automatically without admin intervention.
User roles & permissions
User roles will be defined in the Drupal site and should be copied to the user table of the Wiki site, where they will inherit Wiki permissions defined below (or in the sections on the different features).
admin
editor
member
Future updates
Whenever possible, customization to standard extensions should be minimized so that the site is easily maintained. Any customization or modification to existing extensions must be documented.