Taking Teaching Further

We’re excited to welcome another guest contributor to the community. Daniel Shackelford is a system administrator from Spring Arbor University. He is currently trying to set up and configure Leopard Server and Podcast Producer with some pretty amazing automation. Please welcome and post comments to his posts.

As we integrate Podcast Producer into our media publishing infrastructure it becomes obvious that manually setting up each course for iTunesU publishing could be onerous as our implementation grows.

So, taking a cue from George Cook (from Apple), I modified his pcastgroup script to work for iTunesU.

Note: This article and script are somewhat technical and assumes familiarity with the Podcast Producer infrastructure and technologies.

What it does:

• Creates an OD group for the course, using the course ID (ie. EDU360) for the name.
• Associates the course ID to an iTunesU tab ID (ie. 1234567890.01234567890).
• Adds a podcast admin group to the course group just created (or any group you specify).
• Sets up services for this group (calendar, mailingList, wiki, blog, webCalendar, webMailingListArchive).
• Generates a new workflow from a template.
• Generates the new template files for the workflow (template.plist, info.plist, InfoPlist.strings, multipart.txt.erb).
• Copy the finished workflow package to /Library/PodcastProducer/Workflows.

What it does not do:

• Any sort of verification of the info you throw at it, apart from checking to see if the group exists.
• Update an existing group with the changes listed above.
• Setup the group in a way that makes it available in the Directory app (I am working on this one).
• Create the iTunesU course (you will have to do that ahead of time in order to get the tab ID).
• Add users, grant access, or any user management tasks.
• Work out of the box. *Setup is required. See comments in the script*
• Generate a workflow that does anything but publish to the specified iTunesU course (no blog, etc.).
  

What I would like it to do in the future:

• Work with the Directory app so that the groups can be managed remotely by OD bound workstations. This does not work yet due to my difficulties in getting a plist into an attribute entry in OD. If anyone has some experience with dscl -createpl, I would welcome a little assistance.
• Be scheduled to go through existing AD/LDAP groups in a given OU and create groups and workflows for them and add the AD/LDAP group to the membership so that users in the AD/LDAP group can automatically publish to iTunesU.
• Integrate with Blackboard (or other LMS) so that the existing cross-reference list generated by the building-block we use can also be used to automatically generate the workflow. If this works, the item above would be unneeded. For us this would entail queries to an MS SQL database to get the course and tab IDs, so I am not sure how practical it would be. Might be easier in Ruby than shell.
• Generate a workflow that can publish to other outlets like group blog, wordpress, etc., as an option.

Well, here it is. Let me know what you think, and how it works for you.

pcastcourse.zip

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Daniel Shackelford can be contacted by emailing daniel [dot] shackelford [at] arbor [dot] edu