I'm writing a new piece of code that needs to create an AND/OR association similar to Prerquisites, but have always felt that the Prerequisite interace was less than intuitive.
Does anyone have any ideas how the Prerequisite interface might be made more intuitive/friendly?
Thank you.
Robert
Prerequisite Interface
Hm. Good question, and not just limited to the Docent environment as well. I've seen a number of metaphors used to build logical and/or relationships between items, and over the years I don't think I've seen any I would describe as particularly intuitive in the general sense.
According to 'Joel on Software' and some others, the way to go would be to match whatever the expectations of the user were in regard to how they 'think' about such relationships. So, for a programmer, you might have them type out a regular expression clause. For others with a mathematical/scientific bent, perhaps a logical expression would be the ticket, something along the lines of: ((A and B) or C) might work. The existing 'prerequisites' interface is limited in ability to represent logical expressions as simple 'and' groups that can be tied with 'or'. Since you don't have 'not' and can't nest expressions, more complex relationships can be quite tricky to enter as the must be 'unrolled', and that's not even getting to the mechanics/capabilities of the web interface for editing.
In my opinion, there are at least two major challenges here:
1) Having the interface make sense to the users
2) Dealing with the mechanics of a web interface
I think you are concentrating more on the former, yes? Perhaps if you can give us a more specific example of the context in which this will be applied, something might come to mind.
For the latter, what's being done nowadays with AJAX would be useful as a toolset, but I'm not sure whether the benefit would outweigh the major work needed to graft such technology into the Docent environment.
--
Joe Kyle
--jjkd--
Prerequisite Interface
Joe,
Thanks. Yes, I'm primarily concerned with item #1. Right now I'm thinking about using a wizard. Being a wizard of course, brings it's own issues relating to web pages as you already realize.
The main application here is to allow GLPs to have multiple audiences instead of the curent limitation of a single audience to a single GLP. With a wizard, we can allow the user to do more complex relationships, but of course, then we have more coding issues to think about too. If we encapsulate it correctly, we could reuse the object for Prerequisites or other similar needs.
Thank you for your input.
Robert
Prerequisite Interface
Robert,
I don't get how prerequisites solution is related to GLPs?
As for enhancing GLPs, you can use a user selection wizard similar to batch enroll, where you keep adding selections of users. Of course, there's a bunch of low-level structure that will have to be changed for that, since GLPs key off audiences, rather than sets of people.
I've done that customization before - we called it an ILP. Let me know if you run/ran into some snags.
Thanks!
Arsen
Prerequisite Interface
Hi, another piece to make sure is that the and/or selection does correctly function.
Prerequisite Interface
We were hoping to piggy-back on the prerequisites and add course equivalency functionality. For instance, either course A or course B would satisfy a completion requirement in a blended activity. However, it appears that most of the prerequisite functions are built into the system so that I cannot access them. Does anyone have a way around this or have you explored course equivalencies?