Re: [OpenWeBWorK-devel] Feature suggestions from Chris

[Sam H. <sh...@ma...>]

On Nov 11, 2004, at 12:58 PM, John Jones wrote:

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

I'm not that familiar with the scoring module, so I'll let someone else 
comment on that.

> 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.

While the simple "status message" functionality above is probably 
useful, I think we should consider a full-blown messaging system. This 
is something that most CMSs do, so I don't think it would be 
unreasonable for WW to do it. And soon it will be easy to implement 
(see below).

> 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.

We might want to wait for WWDBv3 (the SQL-only database system I'm 
working on) to implement this. At that point, we could *easily* add a 
`message` table that could support sending multiple messages to each 
user, accumulating multiple messages, sending messages to offline 
users, etc.

An addition like this would be a good test case for the 
automatic-upgrade feature of WWDBv3.

> 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.

That sounds like the best implementation to me. If we do multiple 
messages, we should probably have an escape that prints "you have 
messages" instead of showing them on the screen.
-sam