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Class Format
The options for delivery of this course seem to be as an ANGEL classroom, and, as exported by ANGEL, as a standard course cartridge. It is unclear to me whether this is the best format, in view of the expectation that users will want to modify, adapt, add, drop and so on even to great extents.

Other issues are that


 * Since ANGEL has been sold to Blackboard, we can expect this platform to disappear pretty soon
 * Right now, several institutions are not using ANGEL, so that the format might be useless for them
 * Even more, if we are really talking about "world-wide" diffusion of this material, it is unlikely, to say the least, that this format would be useful outsides the USA

Additionally, my own use of Classroom Management programs has lately consisted in using them for


 * class announcements
 * posting of grades, guaranteeing privacy

Neither of these are parts of our course, as they are specific to each class. More general material includes


 * announcements of assignments, worksheets, and exams
 * posting of additional material, supplementing the official textbook

In my practice, all the above are actually hosted elsewhere on line, and the CM software only contains links to the relevant pages. The reason is that it is much easier to upload and, when necessary, change the postings on a normal sftp site, rather than through the sometimes awkward uploading method required by CM software. In such a setup, there is no particular point in working completely within a CM package. A collection of files, suitably ordered and cross-linked, could be preferable, and it would be very easy to link to such a collection from any CM used, essentially, as a portal to these files.

In any case, while the final production will be in ANGEL format, it will be supplemented by a set of file including


 * The actual class material, as is to be presented to students (hopefully, both in PDF and in HTML format)
 * Spreadsheet files for the data and exercise material. As discussed, these will be natively in *.gnumeric format, but will also be exported to *.CVS, and, possibly to *.XLS. Th eproblem with the exports is thta CVS does not support formulas, and XLS does not support all the extended statistical functions we want to tale advantage of.
 * The source files for the PDF and HTML files. These would be, in general, in lyx and/or txmacs format, as well as teir LaTex exports.

Turnkey Solutions
An additional possibility would be to offer the option of a live CD (hopefully, we would not need DVD capacity - in any case, live environments are compressed and even fairly rich ones, in terms of included software, can be reduced to fit in a CD) which would allow an instructor to work in a custom environment, with all the tools needed, on any computer anywhere. A similar CD could also be created for students. Separate media, e.g. a USB thumb drive, would be needed to store data created in this way. Actually, as long as the computers to be used were able to boot from a USB medium, bootable USB drives would allow to combine both parts in one medium (of course, the material cost would be higher than for a CD, but could still be low, especially if a lightweight environment was used, not requiring a high capacity drive). It might not be possible to complete such a production in time for the release of the project, but this could be done in a subsequent phase.