Create SharePoint Self-Study Exercises And Tasks

The new kalmstrom.com Learning Management System for student self studies in SharePoint is in its final development phase, and work with the documentation has begun. Today I can show you the first Study Manager demo, where I explain how to create the very first exercise and tasks.

For all kinds of education
Study Manager can be used by schools or for employee training. As we build Study Manager on SharePoint, no separate training platform has to be installed and learned. Instead you can take advantage of all SharePoint features to enhance your Study Manager installation and adapt it to your requirements.

Subject site collection
When SharePoint is already used within the organization it is easy to just create a new Study Manager site collection for each subject. Here you can gather everything that should be shared by students of that subject, like a discussion forum or a news feed.

Such shared information can be added to both the start page of the site collection and to the subsites that Study Manager creates for each study group.

Course management hierarchy
Study Manager gives teachers and trainers a framework that can be filled with exercises for any purpose. These exercises and their self correcting tasks are the bottom level in a hierarchy, below courses, parts and chapters.

As the demo shows the very first exercise creation, I have to create a course, a part and a chapter where my exercise should belong. A table of contents is created automatically, so that the hierarchy is clearly visible.

Add in list or from superior level
Each hierarchy level has its own SharePoint list, where you can add new items just as you normally do in SharePoint. But new items can also be added from within an item of the superior level.

What students see
The description fields of the exercise forms can be filled with text, images, tables, links, graphs or videos. These fields, and the connected tasks, are what students see when they click on the links in the Study Manger table of contents.

Excel tutorial
 I the demo below I am using one of my Excel tutorials as exercise. When the students have watched it, I hope they can solve the self correcting tasks I have connected to this exercise. After that they will be presented with a file to practice on.

We hope to release Study Manager for SharePoint in the second half of February, and I will come back with more info before that.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions