[Fle3-dev] User Story proposal: Closing and Archiving Courses

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

Hello world,

This is a rewrite of a really old user story concerning closing and
archiving courses.

MOTIVATION:

When a course has ended, it currently just stays there. The FleAdmin
can remove the course, but then we lose the capability to reflect on
the course's progress. The Teacher can remove all participants, but
then those participants also lose the capability to reflect on the
course. If nothing is done, the course is still open and people can
keep on adding new notes. So: some way to close the course into
read-only mode is needed.

PROPOSAL:

Make this as intuitive as possible - since all courses already have a
starting and ending date, we use that information to automatically
decide if a course is active or closed. If the system date is greater
than the closing date, that course is considered closed.

A closed course is in read-only state: No new notes are allowed and
the group folder is frozen.

If the teacher needs to reactivate the course, she can simply edit the
course's information and set the closing date to a future date.

Also a closed course will disappear from course management and all
users' webtops and is only shown in a separate list. In course
management we can have a link called "Archive" that lists all closed
courses. In webtops, we can have a link "My old courses" below the
other course entries which will bring up a list of archived courses.

DISCUSSION AND ALTERNATIVES:

Instead of automatically archiving the courses based on closing date,
should be have an explicit "Archive" button for the teacher?

Should the user's course list be a swappable list, so that it shows
either the current courses or the old ones (and there's a link to "My
old courses" or "My current courses") or should the old course view
just list the old courses in a different layout that doesn't have the
normal webtop layout?

Should be permit access to archived courses for all Fle users, and not
just the participants? Making the course more public would turn it
into a reusable collection of valuable information (LO, anyone?-).

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS

Possibly a separate library section (in addition to the 3-5 main tabs)
with additional features, like searching from all archived courses,
getting a course in a packaged static html version, and completely
removing really old or obsolete courses. But this can also be
implemented like Thinking Type editing now, as a separate feature
under Course Management. Non-staff users will have access to the old
courses from their "My old courses" link on their webtops.

--
Tarmo Toikkanen
http://www.iki.fi/tarmo/
The Fle3 Team
http://fle3.uiah.fi