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

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Thanks a lot for the information.

And I'm not a teacher myself so all my comments above are based on
second-hand experience.

However my understanding is that the learning goals for each grade are very
well defined and due to the small variety of different school books in-use
in schools (this seems to be a global problem;-) there's hardly any
difference between schools in terms of what material is taught at a given
time.

Regardless of these details there's no doubt in my mind that a
time-component, whether it's a weekly or a monthly basis, is an important
axis of navigation in interactive learning materials. Plus, this is a core
use-case for Nepal anyway so even if I wanted I couldn't really avoid it:-)

BTW, I'd be interested in hearing how the process of getting from national
curricula to lesson plans work in other countries around the globe. Anyone
have more information on this?

Cheers,
Christoph

2009/8/6 NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu>

>  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>
>
>>  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
>> e-mail: 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
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>
>
>


-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
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