SLE: EdShare

Before the Southampton Learning Environment is made available to the university as a whole, the School of Electronics and Computer Science will have the opportunity to use a pre-production release as ECS’ current Intranet is phased out. Keeping this in mind, it is important that the SLE emulates (and strives to improve) the features of the current ECS Intranet such as electronic coursework submission and the university’s teaching and learning repository, EdShare.

EdShare, an extension of  EPrints, is a university wide digital resource for all staff and students, and much of its content is also open to the rest of the world. The goal of adding this functionality to the SLE increase user knowledge of EdShare and, overall, to make it trivial to create, share and remix everyday teaching materials in a collaborative environment.

As with every widget so far, the first step was to create wireframes and mockups  based on user’s needs in Pencil and HTML respectively. The most obvious use case was searching the repository for a certain resource (or set of resources). However, another use case put to us by members of the testing group was to show all the resources of a given module, arranged by the date they would be presented in the case of lectures, on that module’s page.

With these guidelines in place, coding could begin to create the Sharepoint web part shown below. As with all of the web parts mentioned to date, this is still in development and is subject to change as a result of constant user testing, in accordance with the agile development methodology.