Schinckel.net

I’m involved in a trial program using Microsoft Scholaris, an online educational management and teaching tool. There are some issues I’ve come across as I work on it, and I’ll keep a bit of a record of them as part of this blog.

• The first, most obvious one is that it doesn’t work correctly on a standards compliant browser. You guessed it, it only works well on Internet Explorer, and only on a PC. IE mac is pretty ordinary anyway, btu Safari and Firefox both have some serious display issues. It’s almost like it’s been deliberately coded to not work properly.
• econdly, I’d like tools to work with tables better. HTML is notoriously hard to work with tables under. Surely a WYSIWYG editor that can do tables acceptably well isn’t that hard to include.
• Third: I don’t want the students to be able to enter styled text unless I deem that it is necessary. I am interested in content, not style.
• Finally, it takes so damn long to set up one assessment task. To do one questions, where the students have to enter five words, and five descriptions (Electrical Safety/First Aid, DRABC), it has taken me about 10 minutes to set up, and it still isn’t looking right. When I choose not to have a line break, don’t keep on inserting one!

I would love some software like this, that makes it easy to set up online tests and the like, but at this stage, Scholaris isn’t easy. I don’t know who Microsoft bought Scholaris from, but I think they should have waited a bit longer before doing so.