Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Re: Sequence storage LAMS V2 vs LAMS V1

By: Fiona Malikoff

[ Reply | Forward ]

Technically an automatic "Public" area could be done. Whenever a new author or author admin is added LAMS, they would be automatically added to the Public area.

If you removed all authoring access for someone, the system administrator would probably need to remove the user manually from the Public area.

But what would people rather - an automatic Public area or more tools, more integrations, branching and then even more complex branching and sequencing, etc. That is, how important would this really be to people?

As the Technical Lead who looks down the list of bugs, improvements, enhancements, etc wondering where we get the hours from to do it all, I'll be asking folks to give LAMS 2.0 and the new course structure a go for a couple of months and see if you really really do need a Public area.

Changing habits can be hard!

You might want to ask yourself what you would really put in Public now. What if you were a high school and all your teachers put their designs that they want to share with the other teachers. Next year you decide to run a pilot scheme with your prefects, where they make up sequences for Peer Support groups they run (is it still called that these days?) So you give authoring access to the prefects. Now they can see stuff in Public too.

So the stuff in Public is not just accessible to anyone currently an author but potentially to anyone who may ever be an author on your LAMS installation.

Of course, you may have some wonderful designs that you want to share with the world if that was possible. There's always the LAMS Community for that. (grin)


Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

By: Ernie Ghiglione

[ Reply | Forward ]

The reason we had Public in LAMS1 is because we didn't have a course folder, so people needed an overall area to share sequences across what we used to called organizations.

Reintroducing a public folder I think will confuse people more than helping them because they would have to know what public means in terms of sharing with other people... let alone adding another level of technical complexity.

I see however a good thing to add a Public folder if say the University has standard sequences that need to be shared across all courses. But since there's a Author Admin role, they could add these to each course folder anyway. Additionally it's probably easier for the university to do this by sticking this sequences their website anyway.

Not to mention the nightmare in terms of permissions (who can read and write what for this public folder)

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Greg Jones

[ Reply | Forward ]

I appreciate Ernie's comments about prioritising development efforts. I think you guys have done a magnificent job.
Now that I have a better understanding of how the folder structure works I am happy to work with it. The suggestion of creating a 'default' course sounds like it will serve our purposes quite well. Thanks also to Fiona for clarifying about a copy of the sequence being used.

Just to expand on how good a job you guys have done with making LAMS 2 so intuitive. A couple of teachers asked me to set up accounts for them and create classes. Without any instruction apart from how to get into the author environment, they went away to have a play and came back with a completed sequence they will use soon. They also figured out a way of sharing resources using the chat tool.

Once again thanks for a great product and great help.

Greg Jones

Posted by Greg Jones