ideas needed: Online Education for a Degree

payments, streaming media, automated tests

[tedster]

I am helping put together a new venture package that needs to integrate several technologies, and I'm looking for input from those who have been hands-on in the different areas.

It's an educational venture that results in professional credits and degrees.

1. Charges need to happen incrementally rather than lump sum.

2. Instruction takes place through streaming media - pre-recorded but delivered on demand.

3. Testing takes place interactively but pre-programmed rather than live. Test questions may have more than one correct answer, and the program needs to recognize answers that are close but not exact and give "you're getting warmer" types of response.

4. Data on each students payment record and testing results must be maintained.

My first inclination is to let each of these areas be handled by an "expert" in that field who has a strong track record. This appeals to me more than getting one developer who tries to do it all and is weak in one area or another.

But I'm open to the possibility that one developer may have all the savvy required - I just have some misgivings.

So, are there off-the-shelf solutions that can be tied together here? What solutions are best-of-class? Does splitting the functions out to sub-contractors work better than looking for one developer to do all.

Any and all input may be useful. Thanks in advance.

[Shane]

Hi,

I don't know if you are planning on granting a certificate or getting state/province recognition or what guidelines you would be regulated under (if any). If you are, you may want to consider:

I have a friend who works in education and they have looked at this. The big stumbling block for most of this is authenticating who is on the other end of the connection. Degree granting institutions (credible ones) will not grant a degree on work done only through the internet. You must meet at some point in the process for face-to-face discussions, presentations, testing, .....

Universities in Canada do video stream for lectures, but not for tests.

Ciao,
Shane

[brotherhood of LAN]

Have you checked any similar layouts of such sites?

I know there are some out there. An Irish company emailed me wanting partial use of some of my content. They had the same goal as you. Private learning in a secure area, all paid for.

Im making a db for online tests on my site, though nothing on the scale you suggest, because the answers are absolute. I doubt SQL is the best language to use for what you want but no doubt pre-selected statements would be able to differentiate the users answer and compare it with the possible answers

Sounds like an interesting project, and one that makes education a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run ;)

[Shane]

For the close but not quite exactly there answers, have you looked at AI packages?

[msgraph]

I would get multiple "experts" if you can. From experience, having one or two extremely knowledgable programmers will cause problems along the way. Something always needs updating and if the programmer is caught up working on that problem then everything else is left behind.

[Crazy_Fool]

using one developer should make things easier - everything would integrate smoothly (or at least, it should do) and you'd only have one person / company to deal with. using multiple companies increases your workload and theirs, increases costs, and increases the chances of things not fitting together properly.

if you go to one developer, parts of it may be subcontracted out. for example, i could do 1, 3 and 4, but i would pass on 2 to a friend that specialises in streaming. in doing so i know i would get the work i wanted done in the way i wanted it done and delivered on time. even better is that i know it would work with the rest of what i was doing.

looking at your job, it doesn't seem to be that much work.
1 - use a payment solutions provider with repeat billing - emails will be sent saying payment has been taken - run a cron job to read these and save details into the database

2 - i don't know much about streaming myself but wouldn't you just put the video / sound files online as .ram files or similar? no doubt you'll want to change these files every now and then, so as long as you know what format to do them in it shouldnt be too difficult.

3 - all Q and As go in a database with additional fields for "close" or "miles out" etc. if you use a generic script to run each test, then it's a simple case of replacing the database when you have new tests. i've got a multi choice quiz running on a site right now - more basic than your tests, but it works and was fairly easy to code

4 - database is all thats required, this being updatable as per #1. probably need to add in details of all streaming files they are allowed to access and when, and also the tests they need to take and when they need to take them.

then just tie the whole lot together with a means for students to log in or whatever.

i think the hardest part would be the specifications - so long as you can do them, including specifying the database details, you should be able to use a single developer without much trouble. you might find you spend longer speccing it than the developer spends creating it!

i say go for the single developer.

[tedster]

Thanks for the imput so far. I think I'm clarified that streaming media is a bit of a specialty, but breaking that one off to an "expert" shouldn't cause much interface difficulty. The media comes in 60 minute movies, so bandwidth questions, multiple connection limits, etc - I know the place that has a handle on all that.

It does seem like the rest could fall under one umbrella. We just need a solid DB developer who really knows the up-front spec taking process. If I were doing this in the US, I can tap that kind of resource, but it's essentially a European project.

Accreditation issues are not going to be a problem in this particular field. It's a post-graduate program and one of the principles in this project has it handled.