[Using Sakai] Lessons Tool musings

[Adam Marshall]

We've only just started using Lessons at Oxford so apologies for being a Noob. 

In Lessons you can set a prerequisite so that people have to complete Task X before being allowed to contribute to a Forum discussion. We ran into problems when people tried to use the Forums tool link on the LHS to contribute to a discussion before completing Task X. They were told they didn't have permission to post to the Forum although it was not made clear that this was because they hadn't completed the prerequisite.

To counter this we recommended that the Forums tool should be hidden in the LHS pages menu.

So what happens if you have the Home tool on a site? Even though the Forums is hidden via Page Order, the synoptic tool site appears meaning the students have a way into the Forum. (This is actually a problem with Page Order hiding because the same issues is present regardless of whether Lessons is being used or not, it is highlighted because Forums is more likely to be hidden when Lessons is being used.)

It strikes me that what is needed is either for 

1/ Synoptic Forums to be hidden if Forums is hidden, or, 

2/ A new style of front page for when the Lessons tool is enabled.

I was also thinking that if you have (say) 16 lessons on a page: 2 per week for an 8 week term? What most people would like to do is have a set of instructions on the home page with headings of Week 1, Week 2 and so on with links to the 2 lessons under each of the weeks.

This is all well and good but

1/ Somebody has to manually construct the page

2/ If you copy the site then the Home Page needs manually rewriting

Would it be good if the Lessons tool had a Lessons Index page which could be a file in Resources or perhaps a lightweight "Lessons Index Tool". This could be authored a bit like the Lessons tool but the only elements you place on the page is Text (for headings) and links to the individual lessons. You could also have a check box for the inclusion or exclusion of synoptic elements.

This could have the advantage of not showing the unwanted synoptic tools (Forums) whilst still showing the other ones. (The data could be brought in using Entity Broker calls rather than using iFrames). This new tool would also be able to survive a site copy: the links could be rewritten upon duplication.

Hope you don't mind my ramblings.

adam

--

** Note change of email address to adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk **

Dr A C Marshall, WebLearn Service Manager, University of Oxford.
IT Services, 13 Banbury Rd, Oxford. OX2 6NN.