Timed Release of Resources

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Jul 20, 2006 by Former user (Deleted)Version comment
2 min read

Original requirement

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/REQ-375

"Faculty want finer grained control over when resources are visible to students. They want to be able to upload resources, yet constrain the dates/times at which they are available and dates/times at which they are no longer available to students. They would like to be able to manually release document(s) that are in the Resources tool but currently hidden."

Further requirement thinking

There are actually two separable components of this requirement, even if they will appear alongside one another. Separating them has some value for considering the UI for this work.

  • The first such component is the maintainer ability to spontaneously and manually hide/reveal resources from an access (or similar) role.
  • The second component is the ability to schedule this hide/reveal operation.

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.

Requirements

  1. 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).
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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).
  5. 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.
  6. There should be some visual indication of which resources are currently 'hidden,' when the instructor/TA views the resources.
  7. 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, Wiki or Schedule events) are hidden?

What happens in the Search tool?

UI design

UI design mock-ups