Information technology products
In the mid-1990s the Faculty of Medicine made the decision to redevelop its Medical Program, moving from a traditional paper-based curriculum format to web delivery.
Over the years since then the Faculty has gathered together an in-house IT team with skills comprising programming, web development, system administration and graphic design. The team provide ongoing IT support, enhancements to existing online educational tools and a readiness for innovation to serve the needs of Faculty and other university-based and external, commercial customers.
The major software products developed by this team are described below.
The Course Management System (CMS) allows a great deal of flexibility in the creation and management of large collections of curriculum documents in a way which reflects course structure, enabling:
- editing
- linking
- versioning
- staged release to students.
It employs:
- a powerful built in free text search engine -
enabling highly customised searches to be built; - authenticated web access -
by which multiple contributors (including those widely dispersed geographically) are able to collectively construct a course and progressively publish and update its documents to the Course Delivery System on a live website.
The Course Management System is a Java web application that runs in the Apache Tomcat container.
It stores its data in a PostgreSQL database.
The Course Delivery System (CDS) presents course data which has been created in the CMS and exported to a live website with these features:
- robust delivery -
independent of the CMS and database; dependent only on the website server; - user-friendly interactive web pages;
- a record of student interactions with content -
their responses to questions posed in the content, short essay responses in the Clinical Reasoning Guide, and so forth - are kept for their future interactions, statistics, and for course evaluation purposes; - varied presentation of the same content -
students see a more limited, staged release (when required) of course content while staff see further information for course administration purposes.
The Course Delivery system is a PHP web application which uses XSL for its user interface.
The data from the CMS is exported to it as XML files. User response data is stored in an SQL database.
The ImageBank is a database for storing images and other multimedia content. Its web interface allows users to upload images and add relevant descriptive information so images and their associated metadata can then be easily retrieved via search. Its features include:
- powerful inbuilt free text search engine -
to enable easy retrieval of digital objects based on their metadata; - flexible metadata -
which allows repositories to have metadata relevant to their contents; - image resizing on the fly -
which prevents users needing to manually resize images for presentation in a web site or other content; - preset resized images -
for powerpoint and web presentation, for quick and easy re-use of images in Powerpoint or on web pages; - flexible authentication system -
to allow integration of imagebank-served images into educational content delivery systems and other onilne applications.
Our next-generation imagebank, which is currently in development, will also have the following features:
- bulk import facility -
for existing image collections; - imagebank interlinking -
allowing connections between imagebanks for seamless delivery of images from multiple banks to the user. This will enable institutions to share their specialised repositories of educational or research objects for mutual benefit.
The imagebank is a Java servlet, with data stored in an SQL database.
The USydMP Discussion application enables threaded online discussion with many optional features providing flexibility:
- multiple interfaces -
the system can be configured to deliver a bulletin system (with discussion responses or without), a discussion forum, or one of several other customised interfaces; - multiple forums -
postings can be separated into different forums with a shared overview, either by topic or by audience; - automatic email sending -
allowing each forum topic area to have its particular list of email recipients, for monitoring and quick response to queries or comments. It can also be configured so emails are sent to the author of each post when a reply to that post is submitted; - user masking -
allowing several ways of displaying or obscuring the name of users who post into the forums. This is set on a group basis, allowing for some groups of users to be anonymous but described by a general group label and colouring, or only identified by first name, among several options; - archiving -
old forum postings can be moved into an archive area; - sort options -
postings can be sorted by thread (default), date, and user name (or group name in the case of de-identified postings).
The Discussion tool is written as a Java servlet, and stores its data in an SQL database.