Domain Analysis - bounswe/bounswe2016group8 GitHub Wiki

Domain Analysis

In software engineering, domain analysis is the process of analyzing related products in a domain to find their commonplace and different parts. The idea is to find an appropriate family of systems or products in a domain which can then be refined into the particular desired system within the domain.

Quora

Quora is essentially a question-and-answer website where people ask their questions which are answered by the community. Quora's goal is to connect people who have knowledge, to the ones who need it. Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. There is a voting system for the answers which kind of enables the community to pick their best answer. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.

Some significant features of Quora

  • Anyone can ask questions provided that they are users.
  • A user may answer any question of his/her choice. There are no required qualifications to be able to post an answer.
  • People upvote/downvote questions and answers. The catch here is to make "better" answers manifest themselves.
  • Users have a feed that is customized according to their interests.

The main difference between Quora and our project is the fact that Quora is merely a question-answer website where content is created only if questions are asked. Questions are only a part of our project as people are able to create material(topics).

Coursera

Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer their courses online for anyone who is willing to learn. Coursera has partnership with some of the worlds best universities, among which there are also Ivy League schools such as Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Some significant features of Coursera

  • Most of the courses are free.
  • Some courses give certificate from the institution that offers the course, to participants who excel at the course material.
  • Most courses offers homework, peer graded assessments, projects and interactive quizes.
  • Has a recommendation engine

One of the differences between our project and Coursera is, that courses in Coursera are offered by universities and organizations but in our case, anyone will be able to create teaching material. Again, Coursera's material is rather professional compared to material our project's. Our project will also offer daily knowledge such as knitting or how to make a DIY shoe rack, along with professional subjects. All the material will be free as whereas Coursera sometimes requires users to pay in order to take a course or a certificate. Another point is that some courses on Coursera offers no discussion pages for courses in which students can interact with each other and ask their questions. In our case every topic will have its own discussion page.

Schoology

Schoology is a learning management system (very much like lore, only better) for higher education institutions, and corporations that allow users to create, manage, and share content and resources. The cloud-based platform provides tools to manage any classroom or blended learning environment.

Some significant features of Schoology

  • Visually familiar to users of Facebook and other popular social networking websites, which makes the interface easy to get used to and gives it a natural feel.
  • Schoology offers some services such as attendance records, online gradebook, tests and quizzes, and homework dropboxes.
  • Schoology encourages collaboration among a class or a group. This is facilitated by the social media interface.
  • Schoology can be integrated with existing school reporting and information systems. Also provides the security, filters and support that school districts may require.

The main difference here is Schoology is rather a tool for teachers and instructions who work with an existing class or a course whereas in case of our project there may or may not be a class. One of our project's goals is to bring people together from all over the world who have similar interests around a topic and then offer them to opportunity to discuss their ideas and promote alacrity.

Conclusion

Currently there are a lot of learning-teaching related websites in the industry yet most of them are MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) providers such as coursera, [canopylab(http://canopylab.com/), Khan Academy, 360training which are quite alike in terms of functionality. Or Q-A(Question - Answer) websites such as answers yahoo, Quora, Stack Overflow some of which are more topic specific but essentially they all serve the same purpose. Or websites that serve as tools to existing courses/classes such as Piazza, Schoology or lore.

Our project might be considered as a combination of these types of sites that offers Q-A posts, topic-related discussion for students to accelerate learning in a fun way, courses of a variety of subjects from governmental or non governmental institutions, individuals or a group of people who would like to share their knowledge about a specific topic.