Skillclouds - making it personal

We're going to be heading to the University of Greenwich in July for their 2009 conference Making it personal.

The focus will be on personalisation in SkillClouds and on the way that SkillClouds can be used to support and develop the work done between students and their academic advisor / personal tutor.

You can read the abstract here.

What no database ?

At Sussex University the data in Skillclouds comes from our Oracle database.

We cannot really expect everyone else to have the same database, tables or data. The data we display in Skillclouds at Sussex is personal and sensitive.

For this reason the Skillclouds open source version is not really a stand-alone system. It is a template for a webpage within an already existing (probably) internal and password protected web site. It's also not platform specific to a Framework, CMS or ILE like Moodle.

Skillclouds does provide you with data structure diagrams, UML, interactive Javascript, PHP classes, adaptable CSS and front end XHTML web pages to add the data you want to. SkillClouds also provides you with some dummy data, so when you unzip SkillClouds it all just works out the box as if you were a logged in as student at Sussex! Alongside the the code documentation, code layout and variable naming this 'out of the box' approach got the best response from our testing with developers.

The initial code we tested with some developers included PHP's PDO which allows you to connect many a database, and have a layer of abstraction.

Sounds great ? Well almost.

When testing the open source version of the Skillclouds code with developers and we came across some issues with this.

The first problem came when a developer we were testing with had a database PDO didn't support. Just our luck we thought.

The second set of problems came when we found some institutions didn't have the information Skillclouds was asking for in any database! They then had to edit more code than if the PDO layer had not been there.

Another developer described how they write queries for fetching things from their institutions database every day, and so knows how to do this like the back of their hand. Skillclouds having this layer of PDO was more of an obstacle then an advantage to them. They found it quicker to plug in their own code, then plug in the PDO layer.

It is a common problem for open source code that isn't platform dependent.

The outcome is we left the open source Skillclouds code as open as possible for the moment. The PDO layer might come back in the next stage, but for the moment the overwhelming developer feedback was to leave it out.

We can recommend the information you should provide in your own Skillclouds installation, but we are not going to tie you to it.

We are interested to hear from other projects having similar issues, other developers opinions on this and we are still looking for developers to test the next stage of development with. Just press the Contact us link above and say hello.