It seemed straight-forward at first: build a course management system. But then the questions start coming. And not all of them have easy solutions. I started tinkering months ago, creating little tidbits of the system, but now its time to buckle down – school is out so besides working in IT at UCLA this summer, I’m free to really get down to coding.

Several weeks ago I started working with Moodle, an existing course management system, the PHPBB of such systems so to speak. Though it has thousands of users and hundreds of modules, it is not particularly intuitive. A lot of times, doing something right entails doing it more than once. It has its strengths, don’t get me wrong, but it also lacks the painlessness one might desire. For a university setting, with a devoted team of IT specialists, implementing Moodle is feasible. But Moodle and other such systems (Sakai most notably), in a smaller setting, can cause a great deal of frustration.

Thus enter AcademiA. My intent with it is to create a system useable by smaller educational institutions. Yes, this includes SIMM Academies for anyone wondering, but as always, AcademiA also aims to branch out beyond the world of SIMMing. Working with some other course management systems has given me a fresh look on tackling this project, so I’m starting fresh.

More coming soon.

It’s my least favorite part of the process: writing the update script.  For most updates, it’s pretty straight forward.  For this update, it’s a nightmare.  I’ve been working on pieces of SMS 2.5 since last December, so there’s a lot to go back through and figure out.  I managed to keep some good notes, but there’s always the chance something is gonna be missed in the update.  Plus, I know how upset people can be when they update to a new version of SMS only to have us forget something and have to release a patch a few days later.  Once the update script is done, I just have to finish up the skins and write up some new documentation, then we’ll be on our way to SMS 2.5.  At this point, I’d expect the final version by mid-June assuming everything goes well, but we’ll see…