SLK Course Manager 1.0 Released
On the 1st July 2008 the SLK Course Manager package was uploaded to codeplex, this was something that I had been waiting for as there are plans to incorporate functionality into a project I am currently working on. Having installed and tested the solution I can say that I am totally under-whelmed, this add-on was expected to fill the Gap left after the move from Class Server to SLK/MLG.
Please feel free to grab the download an try it out for yourselves, and post comments if you think I have this wrong.
A brief review of the Installation Guide highlighted some real concerns
- You must be running the 1.3.1 (Alpha) release of SLK. Yes you read that correctly - this will only work with Alpha code - who is going to deploy this to live??
- This release is not guaranteed to work with future releases!
For most these two statement alone should have started alarm bells ringing, and you are going to be pretty brave to let this code out to on you live installation. Others have been waiting for ages for these additions so will press on.
Installation
The installation process is not too bad, you do need to pass in a parameter for the URL that actually has a web site - not a problem for most but if you have been a good SharePoint person and spilt out you schools into site collections you may not have a site at the root.
Central Admin feature activation is ok but I would have liked this to have been automated. Database creation is a bit light - it works but could have been more helpful in pulling in default database details and suggesting a name, the code for this is already in SLK so a bit lazy that!.
Only one database? It appears that the solution relies on a DB connection setting in the registry, meaning you can only have one database for course manager across the entire farm. This may be ok for single school installations but what about the managed services or District (Local Authority in the UK) deployments. Again why not use the same approach adopted by SLK to keep things consistent.
Its all a bit manual
Activation of the Course Manager on a site is all a bit too manual. Considering you would need to do this as a site for each and every course.
The instructions do guide you through this feature activation and adding the 3 web parts so i’ll just look at these.
Course Manager Pages Web Part
Course Manager Pages Web Part, just provides two links to the Plan and Assign page and the Monitor and Assess page (both stored in as forms in a document library). I’m not sure of the design reasons for using a document library to hold pages and then not display the pages, also why the link on the Quick Launch when you don’t use the library?
The web part does not appear to have any logic, i.e. if I log in as a student I still see both links? why not hide them if you not an Instructor or Admin?
Plan and Assign Page and Web Part
As described above this page is stored in the forms library of the Course Manager Pages library. But you have to manually add the Plan and Assign web part. Come on please this is not hard to automate a page with some web parts on it!
In this page you have the ability to group assignments into Activities (in fact assignments as used in SLK are called activities in Course Manager) so you have Activity Groups which can have multiple Activities. This is fairly useful in that it allows you to organise activities together. The UI has made use of Ajax so no need for page postbacks - whilst I agree with this I find the actual UI to be very unfriendly.. Why do I click on a blue bar (that looks like a toolbar) in order to show a text box for data entry?
The file upload is good, you can upload a document without leaving the page, but it’s very limited. Why can it only use one Library? What if you have course material stored centrally do you have to copy it here? it appears so with Course Manager. Also if you navigate Up from the root of the document library you get completely redirected away from the page.
Assign / Unassign is an all or nothing activity, no way to choose which students to assign the work to as in SLK, this is an all students regardless! Not sure if that really reflects the real world where you will have mixed ability students in the same class.
I also noticed that any work you have assigned via SLK directly can only be viewed here - no ability to manage these or group into activities.
Monitor and Assess Page
As with the Plan and Assign page you have to manually add the web part which as you can see below is not really the GradeBook we were expecting.
Without any documented instructions this screen is just difficult to understand. There are options to enter values on this page, you can Save - but what? Return to learners - what am I returning? Here we actually see the first real reference to a Course - pretty lame considering this is supposed to be a Course Manager.
Clicking on the Activities (assignments) takes you to the normal SLK assignment management screens.
And that’s all that I could find?
At this point your probably looking at the documentation to see what was missed! If you find anything please email as I’ve not found anything yet. After installation you move straight to Uninstalling! Wait perhaps that’s what is going to happen in reality once people see how little you get from the add on.
Disappointment in what has been provided has been raised and I am hoping that in the next few days I can report that I missed a whole area of functionality, but having looked at the solution files and code (I know it’s not available, but Reflector does a great job 
) I can’t see anything.
Oh and I nearly forgot, if your upgrading from a previous version there is a database Schema change (still testing the MLG version) as the new Observer role has been introduced. Looking at the SLK documentation you are advised that in order to upgrade you need to delete you SLK database and create a new one.
Yes you read that correctly… DELETE YOUR DATABASE!!!
So all that work that you have done so far with SLK will. ummm be lost??? This for me is just ridiculous, how about running something like SQL Compare on the DBs and a little bit of code to perform the upgrade, I mean if we can upgrade SharePoint databases from V2 to V3 this should be a walk in the park.
Update 04 Jul 2008: The UK Education Post on SLK Manager but show different screen shots
The UK Education team have posted an article on the SLK Course manager but you will see a big difference in the screen shots they have posted and the ones actually released to Codeplex. Especially the Grade Book screen.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ukeducationpartnernews/archive/2008/07/02/slk-course-manager.aspx
Update 11 July 2008: Reason for the Differences
Further update on why what we see is different and the plan to release an SDK and hopefully some timescales for the SLK 1.3.1 release.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ukeducationpartnernews/archive/2008/07/11/update-slk-course-manager.aspx
Thanks for a good summation of the position. We have recently migrated from MLG (SP2003) to MOSS2007 and had been hoping that SLK 2 would plug the gap from Class Server.
There is so much potential for a VLE that will operate seamlessly with MOSS2007 - it’s a shame that more thought has not been put into this.
Mike Isted
Mike, I completely agree with you. We need to ensure that all of the options are available to schools, from the commercial offerings of RM, Synetrix through the solutions from people like Salamander and onto the free/open source solutions that have been promised as part of the MLG/SLK solution on Codeplex.
I am keen to progress the Community Kit for SharePoint : Education Edition if we find that the offerings available from Microsoft fall short of their promised goals.
I am hopeful we will get some more news on the Course Manager over the next few weeks.
Seems the screenshots you mentioned on the other website are no longer there? What is going on… this is a very dissappointing release indeed.
That would lead me to believe that there is no plan to update the SLK course add-on.
The implications of this cannot be underestimated, a lot of schools do installation so the SLK code directly , they do not have coders to make changes or enhancements so will start to look at alternative solution.