Re: [WWdevel] Instructors and students in the admin course.

[P. G. L. <gl...@um...>]

Hi all,

Philosophically to me it seems odd to put people in the admin course when 
they aren't administrators.  I can see the argument either way, and 
certainly don't have a good enough feel for the code base as a whole to 
tout my reaction as gospel truth.  But it seems it would be aesthetically 
more pleasing to have an 'e-mail all course instructors' option in the 
admin course, or something similar, rather than simply putting them all in 
as members of the course.  It seems this could be the same as the e-mail 
students option in a regular class, with some conditional that builds a 
list of instructors instead of students when the list of people to e-mail 
is generated.

Probably not even two full cents there, so call it

1.37 cents,
Gavin

-- 
P Gavin LaRose, PhD  |  gl...@um... | 734.764.6454  |  ...you have
Program Manager, Instructional Technology |   to respect someone who can
Mathematics Dept,  University of Michigan | spell  Tuesday, even if they
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~glarose/   | can't spell it right. -Milne

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Sam Hathaway wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2006, at 10:18 PM, Michael Gage wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I'd appreciate comments on the following ideas I have for modifying
>> the admin course (CourseAdmin.pm Module).
>>
>>   Since I run hosted.webwork.rochester.edu
>> I am frequently setting up new courses for folks and then archiving
>> them at the end of the semester.  I have a log file
>> of all of the courses I add, but I need to process that (tracking
>> insertions and deletions) in order to get a mailing list for
>> those currently using the course.  My suggested changes would make it
>> easier to email the people responsible for active courses on the
>> server.
>>
>> The classlist of the admin course is currently not being used for
>> much, except to store the names and passwords of those allowed to
>> setup new courses on the server.  These folks are all "professors" in
>> the admin course.  By default they are all transferred to any new
>> courses created as "professors" so that they can help with any
>> problems that arise.
>>
>> When a new course is created I would like to add the new instructor
>> for the new course as a "student" in the admin course.
>> Students in admin would not be transferred to new courses that are
>> created.  By looking at the list of students in admin I would have an
>> automatic way to send email to all "students", i.e. instructors for
>> existing courses on the server.
>>
>> When a course is dropped the instructor of that course would be
>> dropped as a "student" in the admin course.  This means there would
>> still be a record of the instructor in the course, but they would not
>> be active and would not normally receive e-mail.
>>
>> Since one person might be an instructor for several courses, I would
>> use  courseName_userID  as the student id in the admin course, so
>> UR_mth161_gage  and UR_mth162_gage would be separate students.  I
>> could also use the comments field to store additional information.
>> (or perhaps gage_mth161 and gage_mth162 would be better)
>>
>> I'd appreciate comments or suggestions.  I realize that others may
>> use the CourseAdmin somewhat differently so let me know if this would
>> interfere (or help) with your own use of CourseAdmin.   It's
>> certainly true that I can write a script to massage the log file and
>> obtain current information about the state of the server, but using
>> the email system that is already set up for the course appeals to me.
>
> I always figured that the admin course was a temporary hack. If we
> had had a global user table (like Moodle does) we wouldn't be using
> it at all.
>
> More practically, adding non-administrators to the admin course
> requires it to have a custom permission setup, one where only
> professors are allowed to log in. This would have to be defined in
> the admin course's course.conf, so it would make the admin course
> setup process slightly more complicated.
>
> You'd also want to double-check that the hasPermissions calls in
> CourseAdmin are appropriate. Up until now, I've been assuming that
> only administrators will have access to the admin course at all, so
> they may be inappropriately lax.
> -sam
>
>
>
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