School of Law - eaSOL

Figure 1. The eaSOL site, as at Version 2.

http://law.vanuatu.usp.ac.fj

Anton was contracted to come up with an online education delivery platform for the University of the South Pacific's School of Law in November 2001. The brief was to put something together using only an open source software. Up until this point, the School had been publishing a limited range of supplementary materials in a couple of courses, using MS FrontPage and IIS. Some discussion forums were offered, but a lack of security resulted in too many inappropriate postings and they had to be taken offline. There was also a concern that the unprotected course materials may be poached by other institutions if not protected. Thus the initial requirements were fairly modest - a simple content management system which non-technical users would be comfortable with, discussion forums and an easy to administer user-level security system.

After much web crawling and test drives, Zope + CMF 1.1 was chosen. The range of add-on products looked promising. This was pre-Epoz & Kupu, but StructuredText promised a simple way for people to publish content without learning HTML. Local roles seemed a good way to manage course-level access. The separation of content, presentation and business logic also seemed like a good idea. Despite having never seen Zope or Python before, we were able to get a prototype up and running within a week. By February 2002, we had Version One, offering online courses in 2 subjects using a fairly standard CMFDefault site, with the following couple of non-CMF products hacked into the site as well:

• 'Squishdot' for discussion forums
• 'Exam' for online tests
  

Of course much of the success of the project from this point onwards was due to the strong committment of the Law School staff to learning the new system and using it to its full potential. Comprehensive lecture notes and readings were made available on the site, online tests were written for each week's content area, and the discussion forums were regularly patrolled by teaching staff. This level of committment made the eaSOL system into a dynamic learning environment which students were happy to use.

Incremental improvements took place over the next 12 months as we climbed the undeniably steep Zope learning curve, and new products were released. For example:

• the Squishdot product was replaced by a version of CMFForum, hacked to remove Plone dependencies;
• when Epoz was released, it was integrated into the CMFDefault edit templates;
• presentation templates were overhauled in 2003 to give the site a distinctive look and feel;
• as CMFDefault developed, Page Templates came to replace DTML. Many site components had to be converted as a result;
• in order to integrate PloneChat into the site, a number of Plone tools were added to the site and PloneChat was hacked to work with CMFDefault's main_template.pt;
• some of the navigation elements, such as batch navigation were imported from Plone to improve usability;
• the LTOnlineTest product began development in late 2003, in order to replace the non-CMF Exam product with a CMF-style product. This would remove any need for teaching staff to use the ZMI;
• the LTAssignmentBox product was developed to make the submission of assignments by online students more efficient.

At the same time, students who had used the system in some units were putting pressure on teaching staff to increase the number of courses available in the system. By February 2003, about 15 courses had been earmarked to use eaSOL. A new online-student mode of enrolment had been pushed through with its own fee structure to support the new remote mode of study. Prior to this system being offered, students from around the South Pacific had to move to Vanuatu to complete their studies in face-to-face mode. By Semester 1, 2004, all 40+ courses of the undergraduate LLB program were offered in online mode.

By early 2004, it was apparent from the continued pace of improvement of Plone, and the eaSOL site's increasing reliance on Plone tools and code, that a migration to Plone was in order. The migration to Plone 2.0.4 was finally done in November 2004, involving over 250Mb of course content. The LTOnlineTest and LTAssignmentBox products were rewritten for Plone, and the hacked version of PloneChat was replaced with an unmodified PloneChat2.

In order to cater for increased demand, the site now runs on a 4-box ZEO cluster. The School of Pacific Languages, and the Early Education department have recently begun using the eaSOL system for their own courses.

Of course, the improvement process never ends. We are now considering replacing CMFForum with CMFBoard; adding PowerPoint-style presentations based on Andy Mackay's implementation of Eric Meyer's S5; more improvements for LTOnlineTest; a mail-in content product, similar to the Moblog feature of CoreBlog and more.