We want to spend some time and resources to build custom themes or plugins to use Discourse as LMS. I have some student interns this summer, and want to give the following challenges to them:
- A theme for Categories and sub-categories to appear as e.g. as Modules and Units
- A plugin to create new rules leading to awarding new badges
- Static sequencing of posts within a Category/Sub-Category
- A way of defining pre-requisite topics (maybe using Graphviz plugin) to show at the beginning of each topic, and a roadmap to show where to go next.
- Pulling H5P data to show performance to identify gaps in learning (this may need SSO integration with the Wordpress site running the h5p plugin)
- Create a downloadable certificate e.g. a PDF of granted badges as a certificate.
The idea is not to deviate and distract participants from civilized discourse as a means of learning/helping students to learn, but to deviate and distract all those who use pathetic LMS to use discourse instead.
We will, of course, be using a public git repo and the outcomes will be available to the Discourse community.
If you have more ideas that are important to get this rolling or ideas of tweaking existing features of Discourse get them done, please post your ideas. If not this summer, at a later stage we will be happy to work towards this goal.