EDULEARN12

Peter James Anderson CWD, Development Update, Fast.Q, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

So FAST.Q has gone to EDULEARN12, the conference ran on the 2nd and 3rd July at the Hotel Princesa Sofia, Barcelona (Spain).

EDULEARN12 had participants from over 80 different countries which all provide diverse views in the field of education and e-learning. With over 70 different session there was plenty of talks to attend.

The FAST.Q talk took place during the second day (3rd July) at 12:30. This talk was presented by myself (Peter Anderson) with assistance from Dr. John Murray when it came to some of the questions. The aim of this talk was to introduce FAST.Q to other academics over a huge variety of institutions from all over the world.

The presentation went very well, the FAST.Q system generated a lot of interest among the other academics. The talk lasted for 10 minutes followed up with about 5 minutes of questions. The 15 minutes allocated for the talk/questions did not seem to be enough to answer all questions since their were more after.

2012 july edu_learn_fast_q

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For me EDULEARN12 was a great chance to gain some experience in giving presentations. During the presentation itself I felt pretty nervous, and I feel that I spoke a little to fast and maybe a few to many ‘err’ and ‘ums’, something to work on in the future.

Over all the conference was a huge success with many academics showing great interest, enthusiasm and even generating possible ideas on future development within the FAST.Q system.

I would like to take this chance to thank JISC, Student as Producer and LNCD for funding and supporting FAST.Q.

Update on Fast.Q

Peter James Anderson CWD, Development Update, Fast.Q, oAuth

Hey thought it was time to give an update for Fast.Q, it has been a while.

So the Fast.Q system is up and running, both students and staff members are able to log on with their university details.

So what can you, the student, do with Fast.Q.
Currently you are able to post feedback and questions about a specific module. You are only able to post comments for modules you are enrolled on.

Now the staff.
You are able to view the feedback and comments for any module you wish too. This is update live so you are able to make use of the system during or after lectures.

Whats left to do???
– There are still a few bugs that need fixing
– Need to give the staff access to all modules, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to get a list of all modules, not just the temporary ones
– A little bit on clean up is needed to the the general interface.
It sounds like a lot I feel, but it should be done in a short amount of time (fingers crossed).

Development update – Week 6

Boaz Yehezkel CWD, Development Update, Fast.Q, oAuth

Greetings Fast-Qers!
Apologies for the lack of development updates, but I will quickly fill you in with what has been happening in terms of development over the last few weeks. We have been preparing the system for integration with the Universities oAuth system. This means setting up the staff and student areas so that once a JSON request is made the data that is returned (Module list, name etc.) can be used to shape our system.

Progress is good and we hope to have an artefact which is ready for initial testing in the next couple of weeks. We hope to try out the system in a number of lectures and get feedback on the look and feel of fast.Q from both a student and staff perspective. This initial research will help to shape the system once we begin adding additional AI functionality.

I will write a post regarding how we are using the oAuth system and the benefits of a centralised university login system in the near future.

Boaz

FAST.Q Meets Dev8D

Peter James Anderson CWD, Development Update, Fast.Q, oAuth, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , ,

So FAST.Q recently took a trip to London for the Dev8D conference. With Dev8D being focused on HE it was a perfect place to get feedback about FAST.Q from other developers.

Along with DIVERSE, we took a trip down to the University of London Union. During the 3 day conference we managed to do lots of networking and give a ‘lightning talk’.

The lightning talk gave us the chance to tell other developers what FAST.Q was all about. Within the 5 minute talk we managed to explain all we wanted to about the FAST.Q project with a lengthy discussion after. From this we managed to get a few new ideas and some great feedback on current ideas.

With everything we managed to get done during the 3 days, FAST.Q also managed to win the ‘Best Flasher’ award.

Fastq dev8 d

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What is CWD and why are we using it on the Fast.Q project?

Boaz Yehezkel Uncategorized

Greetings,

It has been a while since we last blogged about the progress of the Fast.Q (full development update to follow shortly) and I would just like this chance to explain one of the tools that we are using to construct the visual aspect of our system, the Common Web Design (CWD) which has been developed here at the University of Lincoln.

This is an HTML5/CSS3 framework which is currently powering many of the projects here at the university, and it aims to enable us as web developers to rapidly develop attractive, cross browser/platform compliant and valid interfaces. In doing so it also creates a sense of unity in look and feel across all university projects.

We have decided to use the CWD as it saves a lot of time implementing our front-end which means we can focus more on the clever stuff that happen behind the scenes.  It also sets to promote the thriving developer community here at the university and communities such as LNCD. There is a real sense of students being at the centre of the university research projects, and using technologies such as the CWD means that we have the support needed to let us engage further with the higher education experience (which we love here on the Fast.Q project).

The most attractive part of the CWD is that we do not have to worry about creating a beautiful interface and then spend an eternity ironing out CSS bugs for older browsers.That is all taken care of by the CWD, we just build our interface and away we go (it also supports mobile device rendering which is a mega bonus).

We will be using v3.0 (Edradour) however speaking to Alex Bilbie (a fellow student and developer of CWD) the new release is imminent which will be interesting to see which new features we could implement for the Fast.Q project.

Stay tuned for updates on the progression of the Fast.Q project

Boaz