Tsugi Progress - New Badges Support - Migration away from Koseu - Using AI

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

If you have been tracking the Tsug repository and tsugitools project, you can see a buzz of activity.  I figured I would give you a sense of the plans for the next six months.

First off I will tell you that AI loves Tsugi and Tsugi tools - the code is pretty basic and easy to parse and AI has really helped me a lot.  I am at the point where I just tell AI to start a new Tsugi tool and it fills in a folder with the good stuff.  Here are some recent examples accellerated by AI:

-  I added image resizing to the peer-grading tool - prior to this change, students had to manually resize images to < 1MB before uploading.  My students hated this and I was going to make some videos on “How to resize” but instead I just let AI write some in browser resizing code that works quite well.  That took an afternoon.

- I wrote a new tool I call AI Mini Paper that is a reflective writing exercise with peer commentary that also submits the student writing to AI and so they get instant feedback.  Like everything I build, it does cool stuff, works well, is flexible - and hard to parse and understand.  Now that it is done I need some UI/UX help to make it more usable.  Feel free to help if you like - more on that in some later email - https://github.com/tsugitools/aipaper

- I added support for Open badges 2 and 3 without breaking OB1 -  take a look at www.py4e.com do a few assignments and then check you progress under Assignments - look at badges and click on one of them - OB1-3 - needs testing but looks pretty good so far.  It took one cup of coffee in a morning with AI.

Also it looks like I will be teaching an online class right in Tsugi for the winter - my new course on computer architecture - www.ca4e.com - unlike most of my MOOCs this is a more “hands on activity” with weekly office hours, announcements, monitored discussions,  a schedule, etc etc. 

I am doing this new work in a folder called ‘lms’  -> ‘/tsugi/lms’ - this already contains implementations for Lessons, Topics, Assignments, and Discussion that is available from the Koseu project.  You have heard me speak of getting rid of Lumen completely and folding Koseu into Tsugi so there is only one repository and more importantly one less deprecated dependency.

Because what I am doing is additive, even if you are using Koseu features nothing will change until possibly May.   I will start to use the Koseu alternatives in my osn web sites like www.py4e.com and www.dj4e.com and test them and innovating with new LMS features in www.ca4e.com as I teach this winter.

I am guessing that by April May when I update the PHP version to 8.5 and advance all the dependencies, I will be ready to remove Koseu from Tsugi.  Of course like always I will have a nice solid plateau tag for those who are using Koseu in their sites.  If Koseu (Lumen) goes to 8.5 easily - I will keep it around for a while but if Koseu blocks the 8.5 move, I will have to remove it in April / May.   By then all the sites I support will have moved to a pure-Tsugi approach so it will be well tested.

If you are using Koseu (i.e. Lessons) - let me know so I have you on a short list.  Because if no one but me is using it (a highly likely possibility) and If I am converted away from Koseu by April - poof! it will be gone.  So I need a list of folks who use Koseu.

So how do you know if you use Koseu?  (1) Do you use lessons.json?  (2) Do you have a file named koseu.php?  (3) do you have a .htaccess file in the folder above tsugi with a line like 

    FallbackResource koseu.php

Again, my feeling is that no one other than me is using Koseu - except of course the folks who have translated my www.py4e.com web site - but as long as they are not upgrading production to the tip of master every week - they will have a tag that works for a while. 

And if you are on a tag or otherwise well behind the tip of master - none of this really makes much difference.  If you decide to “catch up” and are using “Koseu” - the transistion will be pretty simple and the “post Koseu” code base will be *heavily tested” by me. :)

As always - feel free to ask any questions.

/Chuck