CourseForum 6.4.1

CourseForum 6.4.1 is an useful tool which helps you to make e-learning website in which you and your students to interact, whether to create, post, share or discuss course content.

With just their web browser, students use Courseforum to get answers to questions, dig deeper into issues, and work on projects at any time and from anywhere, not just when classes meet. Powerful but easy to setup and use, downloadable and hosted versions are available.

Major Features:

1. CourseForum is an easy to install web application, used through standard web browsers, that lets you and your students host discussions and share knowledge, adding interaction to your courses. Create, share, and talk about ideas, Q&A, research, student portfolios, project work, and more. CourseForum delivers the ease of use, flexibility, and accountability needed for today's courses.
2. Much more flexible than discussion-only tools, each page can not only hold a discussion on a specific topic, but also a set of questions and answers, links to supplementary course material or research, a student's note-taking from a lecture, student portfolios, or more.
3. CourseForum is centered around simple free-form text, making it easy to understand, and easy to work with - creating or modifying content within the course is as easy as writing an email message.
4. Powerful Simplicity
   • Easy content creation
   • • Creating new pages and changing existing ones is done right in your web browser, and is as easy as writing an email message.
   • Link material easily
   • • Connect your ideas and resources, by linking from any page to any other, or to material anywhere on the web.
   • Flexible organization
   • • Through creating and linking content, you decide how your forum is organized and structured. Start simple and adjust things as you go. Put things where they make sense to you, not where a cumbsersome user interface forces you to put them.
5. Easy to Learn and Use
   • 100% Web based
   • • All interaction is done through a web browser, meaning no software installation for your students, and no new application to learn.
   • Short learning curve
   • • CourseForum is designed so that you and your students can be creating, sharing and discussing in minutes, devoting time to course material not software.
   • WYSIWYG Editing
   • • A browser-based 'What You See Is What You Get' editor provides a familiar writing and editing environment.
   • Simple formatting
   • • CourseForum makes it easy to format pages for easier reading, without needing to learn complex tools like HTML.
   • Quick comment posting
   • • Every page provides a comment area making discussions about topics quick and easy.
   • New page templates
   • • Customizable templates provide an easy way to create many similar pages, such as for lecture notes or student information pages.
   • Recent changes
   • • See at a glance the last few changes, to quickly identify and contribute to the "hot topics".
   • Search
   • • A search box on every page lets you easily find information throughout the course, even across projects.
6. Easy Setup
   • Easy to install server
   • • The CourseForum server application can be installed in minutes, and needs no cumbersome configuration or special software. A single install supports everyone in all of your courses.
   • Cross-platform
   • • The server runs on any Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or FreeBSD machine. Users just need their existing web browser, whatever their platform.
   • Easy administration
   • • Administration is all web-based, and generally requires little time to maintain, so you can just set it up and run.
7. Users
   • Guest Users
   • • Forums can optionally be left open so that users do not need to have an account or password to view and/or edit them.
   • Unlimited users per forum
   • • License includes unlimited number of users (license based on number of courses).
8. Courses and Projects
   • Multiple courses
   • • Multiple courses can be run off a single instance of the CourseForum server application, so no system changes are needed.
9. Permissions
   • Password protect courses
   • • Let only the people you want into your course, by assigning it a password, either to enter it or just to make changes.
10. Rich Content
    • Include Markup
    • • Build up larger pages by including the contents of other forum pages or even pages from other web sites.
11. Advanced Features
    • RSS Support
    • • Easily track changes in any forum, or include an RSS feed in a forum page so everyone can track changes in other web sites.
    • Email Notification
    • • Receive emails when pages in the forum change, making sure you are notified of any changes.
    • Activity tracking
    • • See who has been contributing to discussions and who has not, or verify what each person has seen or changed, and quickly isolate trouble makers.
    • Web Views
    • • Provide a view-only mirror of a forum, suitable for use as an external web site, whose content is updated as the forum changes.
    • Custom Themes
    • • Create a new theme to more closely blend in with other web resources in your school.

Enhancements:

• Bug Fixes and Changes:
• • Upgrade internal WYSIWYG editor to use TinyMCE 3.2.4.1
  • Fix bug where insert table toolbar item was not disabled when edit insertion point was in a table
  • Clean up extra debugging associated with 'forgot password' in Campus version
  • Added additional logging of startup errors to both error.log and the Windows event log.

Requirements:

• The CourseForum software runs as a server application on a central server or your own computer, and you and others use your web browser to connect to the software, the same as you would any other web site. All regular use by you or your users therefore is done via any standard web browser (IE, Netscape, Safari, Opera, etc.) running on any platform.
• The software is designed to be able to run on your normal desktop computer if you want; you do not need to have special "server" hardware (though you can certainly put it on a server if you have one available), existing web server software, etc.
• The computer you run the software on should be regularly connected to the network (e.g. have a static IP address/name), be able to listen on port 3455 or another port such as 80, and at least 5mb of free disk space (though you'll want more as your courses use CourseForum).
• The server software will run on any machine running Windows 2000/XP or newer, Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher, Linux (kernel 2.2 or higher), or FreeBSD 4.5 or higher.