2001-2002
Roles: Systems developer (as a staff member of the Humanities Computing Development Team, Oxford University Computing Services)
The brief: The Theology Faculty required a web-based system to manage various kinds of information relating to taught courses (undergraduate and postgraduate). A particular requirement was a convenient means for staff to maintain their own profiles with some basic formatting options.
Solution: An existing system, OxArch, written in PHP/MySQL, with ODBC connection to MS Access database, was identified as a suitable starting point as it was used for managing teaching in the School of Archaeology. It was repurposed and expanded for Theology. A novel JavaScript solution, NetWedit, was implemented for rich text editing.
URL: http://resources.theology.ox.ac.uk/ (via archive.org)
Theology Faculty T&LR: Home page
The hyperlinked pages allowed flexible navigation to quickly access all the required information.
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Lecture Course in Hinduism
Apart from the larger documents, all the information was presented as web pages.
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Lectures for Week 4, HIlary Term
This fully web-based timetabling facility provided inspiration for a later centrally hosted service.
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Prelims Paper 1
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Papers for Prelims
Screenshot from the Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: site search
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Staff profile for Prof. Marilyn Adams
The system also links automatically to a lecture series for which she was co-ordinator.
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
Theology Faculty T&LR: Staff profile for Dr Jeremy Duff
Screenshot from the Oxford University Theology Faculty Teaching & Learning Resources website.
NetWedit: Applying markup
The general workflow was to write the text, then press the markup button to apply markup (here underlining the word ‘sample’) – early versions did not allow editing in the popup.
Whereas, most such editors toggle between HTML and visual views, this system allows positioning side by side, useful for a beginner learning the language.
Tags
Access, administration, CMS, course management, lectures, MySQL, NetWedit, Oxford, papers, PHP, religion, software, teaching, theology, timetabling, university
This page was published on 17 May 2022 and last updated on August 10, 2022<!-- by Paul-->.