[LON-CAPA-users] CourseWeaver? Feedback needed!

[P. David Flammer]

I would say that my biggest pet peeve in loncapa is the slowness of data
reads/writes. It looks like you're going to rebuild the database (to a
non-SQL database), so that appears like it will get fixed. Other than that,
I think it's quite effective in pretty much every way (even though the UI
might not look fancy). 

Even though the spreadsheet is on the discard list, I think it's quite
functional, other than the fact that it can take up to a minute to generate
a student's spreadsheet for a large course. I'm assuming this has to do with
how the data is stored, and once the database is updated, it wouldn't be as
bad. I think it would be a mistake to take away spreadsheet-type
functionality in place of an unprogrammable gradebook, unless you mean to
add some of the spreadsheet functionality into the universal gradebook (like
being able to weight groups of folders differently in a final grade). My
guess is that everyone is exporting loncapa grades out to some spreadsheet
to calculate final grades (unless they use the spreadsheet in spite of the
performance issue). I also think if it had better performance, and possibly
better documentation that was easily accessible to explain how to use it,
more people would use the spreadsheet.

-David

-----Original Message-----
From: lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org
[mailto:lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org] On Behalf Of Gerd
Kortemeyer
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 7:34 AM
To: Discussion list for LON-CAPA users
Subject: [LON-CAPA-users] CourseWeaver? Feedback needed!

Hi,

As many of you are aware already, Michigan State University is considering
significant investment into the next version of LON-CAPA, called
CourseWeaver. Having additional resources enables us to make CourseWeaver
more than "just" version 3.0 of LON-CAPA.


I have begun an informal overview of what that would mean for various parts
of the system:

http://www.lon-capa.org/compare_lc_vs_cw.html

Please see it for what it is: work-in-progress.

We need this information now for the business plan of the new product, while
at the same time, its release is probably two or three years down the road.
Until then (and with some overlap), the current version of the business plan
calls for continued support and development of good-old LON-CAPA.

I am asking for feedback on what should go on this list. What are your pet
peeves and ideas? Any level feedback is welcome (except "Make the interface
nicer!", since we don't know what that means).

- Gerd.
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