2.2 Growing the Ecosystem

People are central to any software architecture. The ecosystem would not be complete without a supporting documentation of all the functionalities. The ecosystem as it stands now can be recognized as a set of core apps and supporting structures around it. These supporting structures are vital for fostering communities around the ecosystem. This prose elucidates the kind of supporting structures that have been built and analyses rationale behind the creation of these structures from the viewpoints of the end user.

The methodology chosen towards this thesis is to tackle it from the viewpoint of a human centered process to foster a community around these systems. My views on building software was greatly transformed by a short treatise written by Richard Cook called How Systems Fail [Cook 1998] The author suggests that software doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is made alive with the people who use the software to meet their ends. He describes that they adapt the system to maximize production and minimize accidents.

In this sense, it was of foremost importance to value the expectations of the end user and the kind of actions enabled for them by constructing the systems in certain ways. In this process I have identified personas of 3 users among many.

First one: The student Second one: The tutor Third one: The developer

The core focus of this project has been the student and is tackled in detail in the upcoming sections. Hence I will focus on the other two groups and detail in brief how the design decisions made from an architectural perspective adds value to the lives of a faculty member and a developer.

For a faculty member, this ecosystem if extended would enable them to collect student progression datasets in a much smoother way. If appropriate application programming interfaces are put in place, there is a huge potential to structure the ecosystem in a way that it optimizes to collect data on various aspects of student learning. A cursory implementation that can be done with the help of the current set of apps proposed is to learn about interaction of the student with the course materials using the Curriculum app proposed in the discussion section.

From the perspective of a developer, the major advantage over current systems is that all the apps are developed in the open in a modular fashion. This means that reuse of the components developed for these apps can promote code reuse. Moreover, the ecosystem also enables creation of bespoke APIs that takes care of a single facet of student learning. This means that even developers other than the core team under control of these systems (students, faculty members and the like) can build their own applications using the interfaces provided.