Alex Little

I’ve had a query from someone looking at running Sled and CopperCore with their students and they have asked me about how to set up the services (eg forum, search etc), and I thought this might be useful for others, so I’m posting my response here…

There are some demo services implemented on our Sled demo site: http://sled.open.ac.uk , but you would probably want to link up sled to your own actual service providers (esp for the forum). There are a variety of different ways in which you could do this (all with varying degrees of work involved!), here’s a basic overview (starting with the option requiring most effort!):

1. Link the player up to your institutions service provider (or any other provider you would like to use), this would not be insignificant work, as (taking the forum as an example) you would need to write a new class in the CCSI module to “translate” the functions that your service provides to the ones (currently) required by Sled. Out of all three of these options this one requires the most work, and would require some java development on the CCSI module.
2. Make use of the Moodle forum integration (obviously only relevant if you are just wanting to get a forum service running!), instructions and the code required for this is available on the Sled website. To do this you woul dfirst need to install and setup Moodle, then install our forum code. Finally you would then just update the ccsi.xml configuration file so that the MoodleForumAdapter was used instead of the KNForumAdapter.
3. This last option is perhaps the easiest to set up, and would involve just updating the Sled XSL files so that rather than connecting to the Sled forum/search interface, you just link out directly to your service provider URL. So for example, you would edit the sled_envtree.xsl file so that when an index-search environment activity was required in the menu, a link to Google would be provided, rather than linking to SearchForm.do – a similar process could be used for linking to another forum application.

You might also want to note that the generic service functions currently provided by CCSI & Sled are quite basic, and were built in mainly to give a working example, though of course there is no reason why this couldn’t be extended further to add in additional functionality.