Course Writing System

Client Intro

The Ontario Ministry of Education is a facet of the provincial government, and is responsible for government policy, funding, curriculum planning and direction in all levels of public education. The Ontario Ministry of Education administers the system of publicly funded elementary and secondary school education in Canada.

eLearning Ontario refers to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s provincial e-learning strategy. eLearning Ontario provides Ontario school boards, schools and students with access to influential education software and resources.

The Challenge

Ontario school teachers required a way to quickly and easily create online course content that accurately fulfilled the mandates and requirements set forth by the eLearning Ontario initiative. A fully secure, online course content production service would effectively allow teachers to develop course content in a format that was easy and familiar, without requiring any knowledge of web development.

The proposed solution would ensure that online course content could be created without requiring extensive production time and resource allocation.

The Solution

Wired Solutions responded to the challenge by developing the fully secure Course Writing System (CSW), a web-based course content production system that allows teachers to develop online course content for eLearning Ontario using Microsoft Word, a word processor Ontario teachers were widely familiar with and comfortable utilizing. Through the CWS, we developed a fully automated MS-Word converter which effectively translates online courses developed in MS-Word into a standardized Learning Management System (LMS) online courses.

In addition, we customized the application to allow the eLearning Ontario team to manage course revisions as well s export courses to their LMS for student use. Integrated workflows and robust engines were developed to support task management features, internal discussions and file version control. A built-in course design template system was developed to render courseware based on pre-defined design templates within each subject area (i.e. Math, Science, English, etc.).

The entire application was built to ensure full compliance with strict government  accessibility standards, ensuring that the system successfully translates MS-Word courses into online courses that fully comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA and AODA guidelines. In addition, the entire CWS web-application and MS-Word components are fully localized in both English and French, which allows the system to dynamically serve content based on the language preference specified within a user’s Profile. With full localization, course writers can utilize the CWS in either French of English depending on their browser settings or user preferences.

The CWS is also fully integrated with XpressLab, our proprietary language assessment and course writing software, which is an additional software application developedd by Wired Solutions and licensed for use by the Ministry of Education, Ontario.

Supporting Technologies