[OpenWeBWorK-devel] Feature suggestions from Chris

[John J. <jj...@as...>]

Hi,

I just had an e-mail with two feature requests from one of our 
instructors (Chris from the subject line).  First, I am not sure what 
the best venue is for entering them.  There is the webwork discussion 
board.  Posting there has the advantage that you can gauge reactions 
from lots of people (they can say "me too").  Or, it can be put into 
bugzilla, but then it has a very limited audience.  I opted for here as 
an intermediate level.  I guess the discussion could move to either of 
the other places if that seems more appropriate.

Also, I am not 100% enamored with either of the ideas below.  But I 
promised to pass them on.

First, Chris asked for the ability to have totals of all sets being 
scored automatically put into scoring files (maybe signalled by another 
checkbox).

Second, he wanted a way to send a message to people currently active.  
The professor could enter a message.  Then, the next time any student in 
the course did something, the message would come up.  Future actions by 
the same student would not trigger that message again.  The system would 
only have to track the most recent message.  He wants it to say things 
like "I am currently at my computer so I can respond to e-mail questions 
right away" and then "I am no longer at my computer".  He doesn't want 
to use course motd for this because it only appears on some screens.

I don't know if this is a great idea, but I thought some about how to do 
it, so I thought I would throw that in as well.

By "message would come up", he suggested a pop-up.  I think a true 
pop-up is not so good because so many people have pop-up blocking.  The 
message could replace the next webwork screen (and have a continue 
button), but that strikes me as annoying from the student perspective.  
The method which would appeal to me is to make it another element of the 
template can-professor-message.  It would be located at the top of the 
main panel with a special background to make it stand out.

Behind the scenes, I would envision implimenting this as an extra field 
in the database.  In the user table, add a (long) text field for 
professor_message.  When a professor adds a message, webwork replaces 
this field for each student in the course.  If webwork hits 
can-professor-message in the template, it checks to see if this field is 
non-empty for the given user.  If empty, do nothing.  If non-empty, give 
the message and set the database field to empty for that student.

Anyway, if we do it, off hand that's how I would envision doing it.

John