eds.activemath.org

This post would like to open the discussion about the usage of ActiveMath in hosted mode, that is, of the exploitation of an ActiveMath server that is used by potentially several projects.

Basically, ActiveMath is currently rather thought as a platform with a single target audience, e.g. at the level of a school. At least this is how the main menu is made.

Deploying an ActiveMath for several groups under the good watches of experts has the benefit of a maintained quality but has various requirements which we try to delineate here:

• performance should be reasonable or at least reasonably managed to so that learners at use are no feeling it sluggish because another team is using it
• the server should be watched for bad events and bad conditions of learners, error feedback of users should be directed to the appropriate person. Crashes are not fully excludable and should be recovered quickly at usage time
• the users’ profile and learner-model should be stored and backed-up so that an update of the system, if need be, does not break these precious information
• if the above cannot be honoured, at least the administrative and configuration information should survive upgrades
• update time-windows, within reasonable work hours, should be scheduled so as to take the time to do necessary with sufficient clarity
• there should be groups at registration time and dedicated registration pages which automatically enroll into groups for each usage project
• there should be a visible collaboration between the host-master and the usage-project-leader, probably one per collaboration project. Such a visible collaboration should include the expected timelines of usage
• the main-menu should be group-tuned (and individual tuned). This is done in a relatively primitive fashion already (see the configuration of ActiveMath)
• if LMS integration is offered, several LMS-“masters” should be supported (not the case of any integration thus far)
• viral effects between content collections should be managed, which probably means that content should be somewhat controlled before being incorporated. A list of viral effects has been started at AMATH-1087