[Sugar-devel] Karma's Chakra - 2 views on lessons

[NoiseEHC]

Now that is strange...
In Hungary there is a document called NATIONAL CORE CURRICULUM (NCC). In 
contains only the goals what the schools must meet at the end of the 
year (in fact it only defines those goals in periods of 2 years), and it 
only has an advised number of hours per week per subject. It is up to 
the school to define a Local Curriculum (LC) which contains the lesson 
structure. Of course the teacher defining this Local Curriculum is 
constrained not only by the NCC but also by the fact that there are only 
approximately 3 books for every subject in a given grade (the school 
decides which books must be bought by parents at the beginning of every 
grade) and the kids have nationwide tests to take. So in the end the LCs 
do not differ too much but giving a date for a lesson is practically 
impossible.

I do not know what other school systems are you aware of but probably 
getting info from around the world would be wise. (Of course if you need 
this feature in Nepal then obviously you will code it so it should not 
withhold nor delay you.)

NCC abridged version in English:
http://www.okm.gov.hu/main.php?folderID=137&articleID=6994&ctag=articlelist&iid=1

ps:
I am not a teacher but my ex-girlfriend who graduated as a teacher (just 
works something else) told me just this and reading the NCC I had the 
same understanding. In the end I am only 98% sure that this is the 
situation in Hungary so I will ask somebody about it.



Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
> Andras,
>
> in basically every school system I'm aware of it's not the teacher 
> that decides what material is taught and when it's taught but rather a 
> well-defined national curriculum.
>
> Hence what OLE Nepal currently does with their E-Paath learning 
> activities is to create specific interactive lesson content that 
> aligns very closely with the Nepali curriculum, the associated school 
> books and weeks when the material is to be taught. This is definitely 
> a major use-case for something such as a library of Karma lessons, 
> hence I want to support it in Karma's Chakra.
>
> However national curricula obviously differ from country to country hence available lessons will be re-mixed in 
> different ways to support these specific requirements. That's where 
> the idea to put that meta-data into the locale/ directories comes from.
>
> At the same time I also think it makes sense to support a more generic view where all lessons for a specific Grade and Subject (or, as already mentioned above, only per Subject) are presented in a simple list.
>
> I hope that answers your questions.
>
> Cheers,
> Christoph
>
> 2009/8/5 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu <mailto:NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>>
>
>     Exactly what is the problem that this solution wants to solve? I
>     mean that is not the teacher who selects from the lessons
>     depending on her personal lesson plan? (Of course we could provide
>     a default lesson plan but in the end it is up to the teacher what
>     she wants to teach and in what order.)
>     So is it important at all to select from a predetermined date or
>     country specific grade?
>     Can it be that I do not understand at all how those lessons would
>     be used in the classroom? Or is this mega bundle (what bundles a
>     lot of lessons from different subjects) solves the deployability
>     problem and creates a selection problem?
>
>     Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>>     Hi all,
>>
>>     I spent some time toying around with Chakra in the past 24 hours.
>>     As a preliminary result I have concluded that we should initially
>>     support two different "views" of the available lessons.
>>
>>     (1) What I call "E-Paath" style (see the
>>     attached chakra_epaath_s.jpg) as it follows E-Paath's current
>>     flow in terms of choosing Grade - Subject - Week before being
>>     presented with an overview of the available lessons.
>>     (2) "List" style (see the attached chakra_list_s.jpg) which is a
>>     simple list of lessons available for that Grade and Subject (of
>>     course one could make it even simpler by listing all lessons for
>>     a given Subject, regardless of Grade)
>>
>>     (Please ignore the lack of reasonable design and color choices in
>>     these screenshots;-)
>>
>>     Now the question is how to generate these Chakras for a given set
>>     of lessons (which are stored in sub-folders)...
>>
>>     In general the issue is that with the currently proposed Karma
>>     bundle layout (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Karma/Bundle_layout)
>>     the only information we have about a lesson is it's name. This is
>>     of course too little data to create a nice Chakra with Grade and
>>     Subject choices. Subsequently I believe that we should find a way
>>     to include some additional information with lessons.
>>
>>     The way that OLE Nepal currently handles it during E-Paath
>>     development is that lessons are stored in sub-folders named
>>     <Grade>_<Subject>_<Lesson Name>_<Week>
>>     (e.g. 6_English_RajuAndTheWolf_1). Based on that information a
>>     support scripts then builds the Flash menu structure.
>>
>>     Now I was thinking that one approach could be to include some
>>     sort of .info file in each lesson that contains the information.
>>     While Subject probably will be fairly consistent between various
>>     countries the Grade information is highly country-specific and
>>     could be put into the respective .po files for each locale.
>>
>>     What do you think, does that approach make sense? What are other
>>     possible solutions to deal with this?
>>
>>     As always, all comments, feedback and suggestions are much
>>     appreciated.
>>
>>     Thanks,
>>     Christoph
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Christoph Derndorfer
>>     co-editor, olpcnews
>>     url: www.olpcnews.com <http://www.olpcnews.com>
>>     e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com <mailto:christoph at olpcnews.com>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>>
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, olpcnews
> url: www.olpcnews.com <http://www.olpcnews.com>
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com <mailto:christoph at olpcnews.com>

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