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Guide > Technical Questions > How complicated is Cultura from a technological perspective?

How complicated is Cultura from a technological perspective?
This question is a rather large one since, indeed, the answer depends on your own technical knowledge. Cultura was developed using existing technologies, applications and functionalities that already existed on our campuses. As teachers, we do not always have the time to implement changes to the databases, the search mechanisms or upload the content of the pages in the middle of the semester. Therefore, we had to rely on outside technical help. For this reason, we developed a strategy that complements the modular aspects of the pedagogy. In its current format, Cultura functions manually, that is to say that all changes have to be effected directly on the page where they are supposed to take place. Subsequent versions should automate functionalities.

In the current version, you receive the Cultura shell pages, ready to be populated with your data:

• Questionnaires: You can collect the results of the questionnaires directly by receiving e-mail and then cutting and pasting the results in a word program. During the past few years, we have used simple CGI scripting to receive and sort the data. This can be replaced by any other programming that is more suited to your campus capabilities. Since many different types of server can be used, you own technical staff will be able to guide you to the solution that can be supported by your campus. You will still have to cut and paste the results into the appropriate pages.

• Search functionality: No search programming comes pre-bundled with your copy of Cultura. Your campus administrators may already have contracted with a company to index your school's site. Once you have installed Cultura on a school server, you need to enter the url of this new site (or pieces of it if you want to refine the search) in the school search. Should your school not have a search mechanism in place, we will make recommendations in the teacher's forum as to companies that can index you site and allow you to search it for a fee.

• Forums: the centrality of the forums within the pedagogy of Cultura calls for taking great care of using the best forum technology. Once again, it has been our observation that most schools have already invested in this kind of programming and it would have been quite pointless to develop a specific system. Any discussion board can be used and hooked up within Cultura provided that it allows for foreign characters. The only recommendations are for message boards to be easy to use by students and easy to administer by faculty . Moreover, you should be able to password-protect the Cultura discussions to keep the discussions restricted to the students part of the experiment. Thorough testing with the partner is recommended

• HTML content pages: the entire Cultura site is self contained and only needs to be copied to a server once the proper adjustments have been made to the modules (questionnaires, search, forums). This operation is within reach of any system admin or support staff. We suggest testing several weeks in advance to be familiar with the issues at hand. Once all the components are set and your questionnaires entered, you will not have to do much technical work while you are using Cultura.

• Updates and archiving: An essential aspect of Cultura is the archiving of previous experiments and storage for future use. You will need to copy the results of the questionnaires, and of the forums since they are sitting on another server and might get erased by your system administrator. Depending on the software, this process could be automated. (note: you will need to have the name of the students removed from the archived discussions to protect their identities)