Dokeos 1.8.6 courses become trainings

A huge number of you might get a very big surprise when updating your Dokeos platform to 1.8.6 soon. As much as we generally try to help users (not to confuse them, keep them by the hand), there are sometimes when a large, influent group of people think a change is needed, and so this change is operated without having a particular consensus. This is what happened here. Dokeos "courses" will now be called "trainings", starting from 1.8.6. The same will go for French, where "cours" will become "formations". So far, I have asked for the Spanish version to remain as "cursos" instead of "capacitación". I can only hope this change will not bring a wave of anger towards the development team. We have nothing to do with it.

Comments

I think the name change is not a good idea. In fact, in Spanish is not a good fit. It's best to keep courses. If someone has a specific need you can always resort to a especific translation. Definitely not a good idea in either Spanish or French

I don't understand why this has to be changed? Isn't it better to add a new language like 'corporate_xxx' and change it over there?

It seems to me that this is a swing towards a Dokeos corporate edition and the education world is left behind.

No problem for me. But please keep in mind that all school and related organisation will have to change all language files then.

Same opinion here if you ask me. This post is one of the ways to gather external opinions and check I'm not an isolated case being worried, but again, I'm not a user, just a developer, and maybe this is a good change that really simplifies the way Dokeos is seen and understood.

As always with such problems the best solution could be to let the end user decide which term he wants to use for the courses through a platform setting.

This problem is pretty similar with the problem we had in 2.0 when discussing whether a description should be required or not.

In reply to by YW

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We are also thinking about developing a language over-writing (or customizing) feature, which would allow anyone to override a specific language base by defining only a few terms in additional (customized) language files. That would allow anyone, with something like 10 lines of code, to ignore this change.

A problem in terminology comes also on the fact that the "learning path" section don't admit (now) subdirectories.
So we cannot group in a gerarchical way LO.

In my opinion:
- A Training / A course is in effect the virtual classroom
- Course / Learning path section is a local repository
- Into the section we need to group in a modular way different LO
- Single LO are structured in pages / lessons (or chapters)/ SCO ...

In my opinion this is a step in the wrong direction...

I realize that corporate interests provide the Dokeos company with funds, but Dokeos has its roots in education. I would guess that most of the end users are in schools and universities, therefore "Courses" would be the most logical description.

In a recent conversation with A. Calvani, one of the main italian experts in e-lerning, he said to me that the international Instructional Design terminology is quite instable: so better is to define well the terms we are using and go forward...

Can we edit the actual words? My concern is that "trainings" is not a word in English, and we do not use indefinite articles, such as "a" or "an" when using the word "training".

For example, we say that we "attend training" or that we "conduct training". We do not "attend a training".

In reply to by YW

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Hi HPT,

You can edit the words in version 1.8.6.1 by enabling the "Sub-language feature" in the administration option, then defining a new sub-language and using it.
This being said, you've been a few reporting the "Trainings" problem and we will apply the change soon at the source.