06 February 2014, 3:52

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out a way to get students to incorporated staff created pages (checklists usually) into their collections and am wondering how possible it would be to do the following

1. Lecturer completes page
2. Lecturer shares the page with their student, allowing copying
3. Student goes to the shared page and clicks on a button that says 'Add to my collection'
4. Mahara disappears into the background and copies the following manual process
   • Copy a page (as per student clicking the copy a page button)
   • Add page to the selected collection (as per the Manage pages area on Collections) - maybe the available collections could be in a drop-down like the submissions
   • The page is locked for the student to not be able to edit (this part may be the trickiest I'd guess, since at the moment collections and pages are the same when it comes to locking
5. Student then has a view only version of a page given to them by their lecturer, which can be viewed as part of their overall collection, but not editable by them

Thoughts?

06 February 2014, 14:26

Hello Wullie,

Interesting idea. Should the lecturer also be able to update the page at times or is that a one-off process? I assume this functionality would be available to everyone with the "Staff" and "Admin" permissions?

Everything is doable, it's just a question of how hard it is. ;-) One place to look at for including content from someone else in a page is the journal and journal entries blocks. There are advanced options and you have the possibility to say that someone should only be able to view your content. So if that could be expanded to an entire page, this part may not be so tricky after all. Your work flow sounds sensible. At some point we should also have a "Copy this page / collection" buttons so that you don't have to go to the copy section, but can copy a page / collection directly from the page. So your functionality could be living in that part as well because what could be done is to ask whether a full copy should be made (that you can edit) or whether to just display the page and then whether to add it directly to a collection. For your pages, the option of actually making a full copy could be greyed out, i.e. not be available.

What do you think?

Cheers

Kristina

06 February 2014, 23:42

Kristina,

My intention would be that once the lecturer had completed their checklist and shared it, then they wouldn't need to update it again after that, hence the locking (for both parties) once copied.

I like the ideas of adding in additional options longer term. Maybe something to build to.

I've never really looked at the journal entry block. Can you run me through/point me to instructions for including someone elses content in your page that way to give me a starting point?

The way I was going to investigate was to find the files and functions that are called to do each of the steps I listed individually, then create a new file that references each file and calls each function in turn to replicate steps, which is activated by the button and the drop-down (probably very niaive of me to think it so straightforward, but in theory that should work).

The biggest concern in my head is that I would wish that page to be locked in their collection, but have other parts open and I know this was changed a couple of releases ago to lock whole collections for submissions rather than locking pages (I did forsee - as I'm sure most did - a time when people may want a mixture of pages/collections locked rather than just one or the other).

Thoughts?

06 February 2014, 23:44

So the question then I guess, is 'How hard would that be to do'? 

07 February 2014, 3:17

Hi Wullie:

Just chiming in here...sounds like a great idea. Is the checklist page a tool for the student or for a teacher marking the pages?

I can see the need for locking the page in the latter case, but in the former case, couldn't the student just add another page if they made a hash of the first one?

In the short term, could the teacher create a manual link somewhere in the copyable collection to a view only checklist page held by the teacher outside the collection that both student and teacher can use as a reference? The benefit would be that that page could later be updated by the teacher, if needed. If nothing else, that workflow might inform any development that you may want to do later.

I'm just exploring here, having fun imagining ways to use Mahara as an informal LCMS.

07 February 2014, 4:46

Hi Don,

The more input the better.

The portfolio I'm hoping to build has the lecturers observing the students (not the portfolio work, but practical assessment) and marking off a checklist of crtiteria/ratings and would be completed by the lecturer.

I would like this completed checklist to then be included as part of the students overall portfolio of work.

I hope that makes sense.

09 February 2014, 16:38

Hello Wullie,

Please see http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.8/blocks/journals.html#journal for example for the option that I referred to for the journal. It is under "More options" -> "Block copy permissions". This type of locking would be different from the page locking when submitting a portfolio I would say because it would be a "read only" option from the beginning. I think it should not be the same as the locking for submission so that it doesn't get unlocked accidentally when the collection is released.

Cheers

Kristina