{"id":1651,"date":"2012-06-11T12:06:01","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T11:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk\/adamweblearn\/?p=1651"},"modified":"2012-06-11T12:08:25","modified_gmt":"2012-06-11T11:08:25","slug":"personalising-weblearn-sakai-the-bms-portal-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/adamweblearn\/2012\/06\/personalising-weblearn-sakai-the-bms-portal-page\/","title":{"rendered":"Personalising Weblearn (Sakai) \u2013 The BMS Portal page"},"content":{"rendered":"
Article written by Jon Mason<\/em><\/div>\n

This year (2011-12), a new course, Biomedical Sciences, started within the Medical Sciences Division. This course combines \u00a0teaching specific to the course with teaching shared with other courses. In response to this, we wanted to ensure that the students\u2019 experience of the course in WebLearn (Oxford\u2019s Sakai<\/a>-based VLE)\u00a0was coherent and personalised, and didn\u2019t require them to search through different parts of WebLearn to find what they needed.<\/p>\n

Therefore, we decided to create a portal page that makes it easy for students to access the information \u2013 timetables, documents, etc \u2013 relevant to them. We wanted the page, and all of the content, to remain in WebLearn, to ensure that managing the content and the users remained straightforward for lecturers and administrators accustomed to using WebLearn.<\/p>\n

\"Biomedical<\/a><\/div>\n

The resulting portal page, shown above, provided students with a slick, modern-looking page, on which they could see any recent announcements, view their timetable and access documents both relating to their course and from their personal site within WebLearn.<\/p>\n

In order to achieve this, it was necessary to create a multi-level structure for the site, with the main site containing a sub-site for each year of the course, and each year site containing a sub-site for each module.<\/p>\n

To dip quickly into the technical aspects, the portal page makes significant use of JavaScript<\/a>, in particular the JQuery <\/a>library. Where possible, the content, along with the user\u2019s status and year-group, is gathered using Ajax<\/a> requests to \u2018WebLearn direct\u2019 (web service) URLs,<\/a> which return information, such as a user\u2019s recent announcements, in a computer-friendly format, e.g. JSON<\/a>. A brief summary of how the different sections of the page are created is given below:<\/p>\n

Announcements<\/strong><\/h3>\n

<\/strong>WebLearn\u2019s direct methods are used to get a user\u2019s announcements, specifying the number and age to show. These are then presented to the user in an \u2018accordion\u2019, where clicking on an announcement title expands further details of that announcement.<\/p>\n

Calendar<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The requirement for the calendar was to bring together multiple module calendars into a single view, with a different colour for each module. This was achieved as follows:<\/p>\n