GURU
The learning technologies area at TAFE Tasmania had been busy developing new web applications to accelerate the recognition process in their organisation. When they came to us they had major presentation to do in a month, and they want it to "resemble a finished web application".
The web application means a learner can login in to the system to see the requirements for recognition and then upload and collate their evidence. This system is integrated with their student record management system and other assessment systems they use such as the QTImPlayer. The development team had been busy working away on the functionality without much attention to the visual design and interface design.
This is a screen grab of the system before we started
This was a great project for us, we brought our knowledge of the Australian VET system, teaching and learning and web technologies all together.
The process we went through was
- Name and Logo
The working title for the project was ‘Beyond Recognitio’n but the team wanted something that sounded more like a web application name. They settled on Guru which is short for "Get ur (your) Recognition Universe". Once the name was decided we developed a number of logo ideas for the team to choose from. - Visual Design and interface design
The logo became the basis for the visual design; the colour scheme for interface flowed from the logo. The learning technologies team had developed the system in Python and made sure that the html code was nicely named, they also worked with the Adobe Spry Ajax framework. This made it easy for us to develop the visual look for the system in CSS code without having to worry about the back-end. There were a number of user interface issues that we couldn’t do anything about in the timeframe available. We would have loved the interface to focus on what the learners had to do instead of focusing on the competencies.
For the presentation Guru resembled a polished web application and the audience was excited. What is fabulous about CSS style-sheets is that the Learning Technologies team have been able to keep on using them as the application has been further developed.
