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- The first such component is the maintainer ability to spontaneously and manually hide/reveal resources from an access (or similar) role, ideally through a single click (i.e. not having to go to a new screen).
- The second component is the ability to schedule this hide/reveal operation, which could not be accomplished through a single click.
Potential pitfalls
What happens when resources that are attached in other tools (like Announcements or Schedule events) are hidden? They will be inaccessible, but how can this be handled so that the site maintainer does not unwittingly create new problems for themselves?
Use Cases
- An instructor wants to pre-load all her resources at the beginning of the term, but organized into one folder for each week of class, and each folder is automatically "turned on" at the beginning of each week.
- An instructor wants to upload exam solutions to the site, but set them to be visible only at midnight following the exam day.
- An instructor wants "stale" content to disappear from the student's view after two weeks, yet still wants to keep the content visible to teaching assistants and instructors of the site.
- An instructor wants to upload lecture notes for an entire term in one go, but set them to be revealed to students only after the scheduled lecture.
- An instructor may want to post answer sets to homework assignments, but only make them available after the due date of the homework, and yet would like to have them all uploaded and available for teaching assistants at the beginning of the semester.
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- A site maintainer should be able to set any given resource to be hidden from 'access' roles (e.g. students) but visible to others (e.g. instructors and TAs).
- Content thus hidden should also not be visible through a WebDAV connection for an 'access' role (i.e. WebDAV should not present a security hole).
- When the content is uploaded the option must be available for it to be automatically hidden. It should not be necessary to have the file exposed for a period of time until a subsequent action is taken to hide it. WebDAV uploads should be similarly covered.
- A site maintainer should be able to constrain "start" and "end" dates and times for an item's visibility (i.e. to schedule this in advance).
- A site maintainer should be able to indicate just one or both of the start and end date properties. Using one property should not require the other.
- There should be some visual indication of which resources are currently 'hidden,' when the instructor/TA views the resources.
- This functionality has no meaning within a "MyWorkspace", and should not be available there.
Potential pitfalls
What happens when resources that are attached in other tools (like Announcements or Schedule events) are hidden? They will be inaccessible, but how can this be handled so that the site maintainer does not unwittingly create new problems for themselves?