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ARC PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Ecoplexity Phase II

last updated on Thu, 10/23/2008 - 10:29

Contents
  1. General Information

    1. Description

    2. Purpose and goal of the project
    3. Client contact
    4. Personnel
  2. Scope and Scale
    1. Customer

    2. Users/ audience
    3. Scope
    4. Partners
  3. Architecture / Design
    1. Project Specification

    2. Requirements
    3. Project home and resource storage
    4. Related projects

  4. Project status
    1. Timeline

General Information

Description

Ecoplexity is a short name for the "Teaching Ecological Complexity" program (TEC). This program provides information and training for high-school teachers, in ways to bring science inquiry into classrooms. The original Ecoplexity webpage was designed by ARC.

Ecoplexity Phase II seeks to improve upon Eclopexity, in the sense that it will be more user-friendly and feature a more intuitive interace.

Purpose and goal of the project

Upon implimentation of Ecoplexity, there were some sporadic issues with user friendliness. Students and teachers did not understand certain sections, and more infromation became nescessary.

Ecoplexity Phase II seeks to improve the design and ensure that it is as streamlined , functional, intuitive, and easy to use as possible.

Client contact

Marion Dresner (Center for Science Education faculty): dresnem@pdx.edu, 503-725-5961 (PSU)
Andrew Moldeneke (OSU faculty): moldenka@science.oregonstate.edu, 541-737-5496
Claire Steiner (Marion's graduate assistant): csteiner@pdx.edu, 503-725-5961

Personnel

Jesse Nicola - Project Management
Josh Caplan - Project plan, R code, and misc. Drupal work
Cris Holm - Drupal programming
Morgan Harvey - R bridge and Drupal programming

Scope and Scale

Customer

Center for Science Education at Portland State University

Users/ audience

Primarily high-school teachers and their students. Secondarily, the TEC project leaders who will use the interface to add content to the site

Scope

This website will be used in many different class rooms accross the united states, and be accessed by many different teachers and proffesors from various educational institutions around the country.

Partners

Oregon State University
HJ Andrews Experimental Forest (Oregon)
The National Science Foundation
Other ecological research stations throughout the US, and in Puerto Rico

Architecture/Design

Project Specification

A.    My Research pages will be improved by:

a.       Generating a more polished window than the current My Research page

b.      Creating a portal for students (perhaps by improving the public version of My Research)

c.       Re-categorizing all nodes so none appear under “title”

d.      Dividing the “Everyone's Research” page by site affiliation

e.       Making it possible for teachers to upload files to their My Research page

f.       Enabling teachers to select a subset of material to insert with drop down menu of at least these 3 categories:

                                                        i.      Stages of science inquiry

                                                      ii.      Qualitative modeling

                                                    iii.      Assessment or other

 

  

B.     The user-friendliness of the site will be improved by:

1.      Creating a “How to use the site” page. This will guide the user to log on, and either go to their own LTER site page (summer training) or their own school page.

2.      Indexing protocols so teachers can select the most relevant ones (by region/habitat, stage of inquiry, specific organism(s), cost of materials, time to perform, and teaching standard).  This will be done in collaboration with Ecoplexity staff.

3.      Removing the left sidebar from the modeling animations.

4.      Improving the “theme” by modifying CSS.

5.      Simplifying the menu structure:

  1.  
    1. Ecoplexity

                                                              i.      Include home, site index, user account

                                                            ii.      Collapse Training and LTER sites (put under Resources for teachers)

                                                          iii.      Move the Blog to Resources

  1.  
    1. Resources

                                                              i.      Take out analysis tools, protocol finder, keep under science inquiry (e.g., keep science inquiry, collapse more things under it)

                                                            ii.      Have a link to the on-line preliminary course under resources

    1. Ecology Concepts:  Lynda will take some of these out, leaving only 3
    2. Scientific Inquiry: Only the main links should appear in Views, not all pages in the taxonomy
 

C.     Data Analysis Tools will be expanded, though their interface will be streamlined:

1.      Simplify explanations to be usable by high school students (e.g., Make the "Please Read first" section more noticeable, having a “one-liner” description immediately available with collapsible, more thorough descriptions available)

2.      Expand explanations of output

3.      Present means of getting around VB macro more clearly

4.      State purpose of each tool at the top of the page

5.      Labels will be added to rank-abundance plots

  

D.    The site will be expanded, with the following new features added:

1.      A tool to assess how the site is being used (e.g., displays the number of pages in each teacher’s My Research)

2.       

Time estimate:  20 hours

   

Requirements

1) Drupal - a PHP and MySQL based content management system 2) R - an open source data analysis package 3) R-PHP - a bridge that communicates with R using PHP code

Project home and resource storage

Development site (on Research):
http://www.ecoplexity.org

The beginning of a defunct TEC homepage:
http://tiw.research.pdx.edu/original

The mockup Josh and Ryan created:
http://tiw.research.pdx.edu/mockup

Related Projects

Ecoplexity (phase I) (http://www.arc.pdx.edu/node/41/10#toc1)

Project status

Timeline

The above changes are projeted to be finished by January 15, 2008