Successful in her eCampusOntario grant application to produce a first-of-its-kind online French-language resource about indigenous literature and culture in Canada, Brescia University College professor Dr. Carmen McCarron sought a local technology firm to bring her proposal on paper, to life.
About the project
Northern worked with Dr. McCarron on the creation of littautochtone.org, an eight-chapter multimedia online experience that has use as a complementary learning resource for her own students, or as a standalone resource in high schools and universities across the country. Each chapter consists of a written reading guide fortified with multimedia components such as video, images, and audio files; a bibliography, and a multiple choice-answer quiz.
This project was not without some challenges. First, there was the hurdle of hosting. Dr. McCarron’s employer, Brescia University College, could not provide the hosting environment within the timeline of the project launch. In response, Northern coordinated the hosting on a server other than the university’s by working with the grant organization directly in order to establish a proper repository to house the site.
Second, and by the dictates of the eCampusOntario grant, the open textbook could not include any third-party content -- meaning that any and all material included within must be produced by Dr. McCarron or by authors and artists named in her original grant application. To meet this restriction, all third-party content source material, is linked to a channel on YouTube and not within the resource itself.
Says Dr. C. McCarron, "Digital Echidna (now Northern Commerce) was respectful of the content and understood the importance of the project within the academic community. I believed my project was in competent hands from the beginning."
Technology Overview
- Drupal 8 build
- WCAG 2.0 Level AA Compliance and Accessibility
- Multilingual Support
- Responsive Design
Why Drupal was chosen
Dr. McCarron was seeking a knowledge base to house content to use within a course curriculum that featured a natural progression (e.g., chapter one, chapter two, etc.). To this end, Northern developed an online open textbook making use of Drupal 8 content management system’s Book and Quiz modules.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Drupal’s Book module provides a hierarchy to pages that allows for a next/previous functionality, useful in cases like this project, where content has a logical order. Book module comes with a table of contents block and outlines the hierarchy of
the book for easy navigation.
Drupal’s Quiz module creates graded assessments as a series of questions. Answers are stored in the database and results displayed during or after the quiz. Administrators can provide automatic or manual feedback.
