17 April 2012, 3:15

Hi All,

For a while now I've been thinking that the management of pages is a bit messy and unorganised (for example I have a lecturer who wanted to trial this for her 19 Communication classes, but it was decided this would be too much).

As far as I can tell, there is no way to organise your pages and think it would be good to be able to manage them (into folders?) so that you can organise them sensibly (I know that you can use collections, but you're still left with a load of disorganised pages for multiple collections).

In the example above, I can envisage the lecturer wanting to create feedback forms as pages for each possible level (3 levels) and copying the relevant level page to each student (approx 220 this year). As you can see this would be very messy. However, if she had each of those 3 pages as templates and was able to copy the page into (for example) a Social Care folder with 15 students, its so much easier to navigate.

Would people find it more useful to be able to organise these into folders like files? I know it's possbile to use well tagged pages (to search on the pages page) but more difficult to explain to a lecturer who doesn't understand tagging. Is it possible to do this through the groups?

Any feedback on the above would be greatly appreciated and if people think that folders are a good idea, I'm happy to raise a tracker issue for it.

Thanks

17 April 2012, 3:27

Hello Wullie,

Some time ago, multipage views (yes not yet pages back then) were discussed. The specs are at https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Multipage_Views

A corresponding discussion is at https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1066

Ecept for collections nothing has been implemented yet. Group and institution collections are another step that we at Catalyst will be looking at soon. Then it should be possible for your instructor to create multiple collections on the institution level and have them automatically put into all new institution user's portfolios. Alternatively, the users should be able to copy collections from a group. We haven't started the work yet (had to get the release of Mahara 1.5 out of the way first ).

I don't yet quite understand how folders would be much different from collections. Do you envisage that there can be different permissions for the pages in a folder? Would users then get access to a folder? It would be great if you explained your ideas a bit more (maybe even with a diagram?).

Cheers

Kristina

17 April 2012, 6:08

Kristina,

Thanks for getting back to me. Having looked at the 2 links, I'm not sure if what I am suggesting is what is being discussed (or maybe it is using views/terminology/discussions from when it was first suggested and things have changed).

The problem I'd guess is not for students as much, but more for lecturers managing the students submitted work and using Mahara as a way to share feedback back to the students.

The pages page at the moment contains your Dashboard page and your Profile page by default then up to x amount of other pages (in the scenario I mentioned above this could be 220 pages spread over 22 pages (views works better as a word for discussing this than pages ) making it difficult to find what page you are after.

Here's an example:

I have a feedback sheet for Student 1 on the Social Care course class A, which has not been tagged - each should be named the same with the exception of the students name - Feedback for Comms: Student 1. If it is, I can search by the Students name as part of the title and narrow it down, but then I have two Student 1's, one doing Social Care and one doing IT, so the naming goes off a bit...... you can see where this goes.

Now, I could setup a collection of all of my Social Care students, but I don't want them all to see each others feedback, so that doesn't work.

It could instead be setup like the Web Page Manager image posted by Nigel in the discussion you posted here (about halfway down), where you can create a folder-like structure to your pages and manage them more efficiently.

I hope that makes a bit more sense.

17 April 2012, 15:22

Hello Wullie,

Thanks for the explanations.

Looking at the current functionality (and leaving the drag-and-drop from Nigel's wireframe out for a moment), could that actually be achieved on the Collection tab? We could re-design that so that pages aren't just listed in one line but are displayed beneath each other with the edit and delete buttons.

Then being able to just show the collection title or all pages that are contained within (like the options drop-outs we have on "Config site" or in the resume section so that you could just show the birds-eye view or all pages that are within a collection.

Maybe you could even configure how many collections per page you want to show (there might have to be a limit if that is quite resource intensive).

What do you think?

Cheers

Kristina

18 April 2012, 3:32

Kristina,

All well and good, but what about those pages that aren't part of collections? In my example, none of the 220 pages would be part of a collection.

Thanks

17 April 2012, 23:46

Hello Wullie,

that makes perfect sense. The Explorer type organization of files, pages and collections is popular with a lot of users. We had a user with over 1000 pages to look at and it was not easy for her.

However, the newly released 1.5 improves this I believe. You can now sort the pages that were shared with you by Owner, Last Update, Title and Last Update and Comment. You can even narrow down your search by Title, description, Tag or search just in Tags. The generated list is sorted alphabetical which makes it nice. I have yet to see it in action with hundreds of pages but I think it will work very well. I think it then becomes a matter of changing habit of where to look for the pages. Have a look at the screen shot below. Time will tell if users will adapt this. 

18 April 2012, 3:17

Dirk,

I can't see any image.

I'm glad that there is improved functionality for pages in 1.5 (maybe I should have tested and checked this first before posting here, but not got round to installing a test 1.5 yet).

Is this just in the shared pages area, or in your own Portfolio->Pages too?

Thanks

18 April 2012, 14:42

Hello Wullie,

I think you need to be logged in in order to see the picture that Dirk posted. It pretty much shows what you can see in the screenshot in the user documentation at http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5_STABLE/groups/shared_pages.html Sorry for not mentioning this fact. I was assuming that you wanted to order your own pages and not those of others.

In regard to your question above: What to do with the pages that aren't in a collection. Yes, that is a good question and I don't have an answer for that because you may not want to give the same access rights to some of them and place them in a collection.

I would be hesitant to introduce another way of clustering pages, e.g. folders besides collections, as this might become confusing when which is to be used and could you then also have collections in folder or a page in a folder and a collection etc. Maybe the concept of collections needs to be revisited as it was only one step into the direction of what had been envisaged earlier.

Cheers

Kristina

19 April 2012, 3:07

Kristina,

You are correct, it is my own pages that I want to sort the display of, not the shared pages (apologies if their has been any confusion).

Imagine my portfolio->pages set out as below

Dashboard Page
Profile Page
A Students Feedback Page
A second students Feedback Page
Another students feedback page
B Students Feedback Page
C Students Feedback Page
C second students feedback page
.....

Now imagine this for 220 students feedback pages, without tags. Which course is B Student part of? Where are my Care students or my rugby students?

I understand that Mahara is written from a students ownership perspective, but it seems that no-one has thought that the lecturers may want to use Mahara (in kind of the same way so that they can learn it for the students) and the functionality is not really there for them.

I hope this makes a bit more sense

19 April 2012, 15:23

Hello Wullie,

Mahara assumes that feedback is put on the pages on which feedback is given and not on a separate page. I haven't come across this use before. Does your teacher then allow the students to copy the feedback page into their own portfolio for keeping the page or might they be losing access to it at some point?

Does the teacher keep the feedback pages to be able to easily expand on them? Are they using a rubric that needs to be filled in over time?

As I wrote above, if you have a great idea of what it could look like, please make the proposal and offer it for discussion. Maybe your teachers want to chip in as they are using the system?

Cheers

Kristina