09 January 2014, 6:33

I have two sort of related questions that I cannot find the answers to

In my class I am trialling "open" pages. As an administrator, I create a closed group and then prefill it with my students giving them the rights to create pages.

Students then create pages in the group which can be seen by everyone else enrolled in the group.

This has a number of benefits:

• I can add feedback at any time without students "submitting" and having their pages locked
• Students can see the work of other students and make comments without having to "share" the pages
• Students can work in groups and create collections of pages

The two drawbacks appear to be:

• I cannot tell when a student has updated their page so I can go in and check it/make a comment ( I currently go through each one!)
• Students could edit other students pages (but they wont as they are very nice and only 11)

Is there a solution to the two drawbacks preferrably with me keeping the original system.

Many thanks as always

Gideon

10 January 2014, 3:21

Hi Gid,

Happy New Year. Can't you ask easy questions to get us back into the swing? ;)

On the first drawback - would adding the pages to your watchlist achieve this? Might be a bit labour intensive but you'd get a notification every time the page was edited.

On the second issue - not sure if there is a way around this currently without using submission feature. It was around issues like this that I proposed the sub-groups functionality - https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1169962 - Your issue is a good use-case scenario for having a single group for all of your students but being able to differentiate the rights to the pages within that group, so individual users have editing rights to some pages, others viewing rights only, and depending on how it's being used some members might have no rights on certain pages and don't even see them listed (so no scary access denied message) - eg subgroups that you want to keep separate until they've presented their work to the bigger class. If anyone has a good alternative way of dealing with this I'd love to hear it as my (separate) groups list is expanding throught the floor!

Cheers, Gordon.

10 January 2014, 6:31

Gordon, I like to keep you on your toes!

Thanks for those ideas and I might try out the watchlist. I'll certainly go and look at the proposal and might submit one of my own.

Gid