[Bodington-developers] Customisable LHS panel in Bod

[Adam M. <ada...@co...>]

I'm canvassing opinions here. I proposed this as a 3rd year computer science
project and we now have a taker. 

Can you spend 5 minutes looking at this and suggest any modifications or
problems. I suppose this is basically a feature proposal.

What do we do about people that turn off the panel - do we provide a link to
the panel somewhere thereby highlighting that there maybe something
important.

If you think it's a crap idea then let me know and I get the student to do
something else instead.

adam

--

What we are proposing is that the LHS panel has the opportunity to contain
an HTML page which is specific to the current room or floor - the tutor can
upload a LHS panel resource for each building / floor room / etc. If the
current position in Bod doesnt have a LHS panel resource then the next
resource higher up in the tree is searched (ad nauseum).

This mean that (say) the Biology floor can have a LHS panel which contains a
list of special biology lectures happening this term. Doctor Foster's room
on the floor can have a list of times when he is available for consultation,
Doctor Mopp can likewise have a list of times when he is available. Inside
Doctor Fosters room each of his courses can have a list of useful resources
- the list changes dependent on which room you are in. If a room doesnt have
a specific LHS panel resource then the parent resourse's panel is used.


5/1/05 Sandra Meredith

Given that changes are underway for the left side bar in weblearn, would it
be possible for us to be able to customise them? We could put a whole
variety of useful links in the sidebar that would be suitable for our
students but not for those in other disciplines. Things like links to news
feeds in the sidebar would not be useful for us - we use weblearn for
teaching sessions, and students may also use it for self-learning in their
own time, but it's not a great time to be distracting them with the news.
They are plenty good at distracting themselves without our help.
Angela Carritt

Does this mean that each subject/floor will have its own LHS panel but that
owners of particular rooms or suites of rooms will be able to set up their
own side panel in preference to the standard panel? If so, will room owners
be able to set up the side panels themselves (using a form?/html?) or will
we have to ask someone in the Weblearn team to do it for us?

Sandy and I look after several suites of rooms on the Law Floor in the
Social Sciences Division. We would like to set up several different LHS
panels for the different rooms. For example we use one suite of rooms for
our Legal Research Skills Programme. We would like to set up a couple of
different LHS panels to use in this suite. These LHS panels would include
elements such as:

1. A link to Oxlip on the web and to relevant web pages on the Law Faculty /
Bodleian Law Library / external web sites 2. A tips section. For example we
might want to have a scrolling tips box including information about how to
resize windows, the difference between tick boxes and radio buttons in the
MCQ test, how to use INFORMS tutorials etc. We might want to have different
tips for different rooms which would presumably mean that we would need to
have different LHS panels for different rooms. 3. Would it be possible to
display information in the LHS panel which changes depending on actions by
the user in the main part of the window? For example would it be possible to
display information in the LHS panel when a user clicked on a link in the
centre or on mouse over? I'm not sure if we would want to do this but it
would be interesting to know if it's a possibility.

We also have a set of rooms for our distance educations students. We would
like to use a different LHS panel for these students. This would again
probably consist of links, tips, mailto links and possibly dynamic
information.

In summary it would be useful for us if we could create a set of 4 or 5
different LHS panels to use in our various rooms. Each LHS panel would
include links, text (possibly scrolling) and possibly dynamic information.
It would be useful if we could change the content of each LHS very quickly
and without needing assistance from the central team. I think that this
would be our ideal scenario for the LHS panels.

--
Adam Marshall:       OUCS, 13, Banbury Rd. Oxford OX2 6NN.
Shameless plug:      Use the Bodington VLE http://bodington.org
Blog:                http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/blog/adamm/
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