Moodle

From non non (nbhansen at midway.uchicago.edu) Sunday, 23 July 2006, 09:41 PM:

I'd just like to add another comment on my second point and that is that there is no way for a teacher to know if a student has submitted a new database entry that requires approval unless one sorts the entries by date entered and looks for the latest entries.

I think that the approval logic needs a little improvement. I have two points that I would like to see covered that I believe would greatly increase the usability of this module in a K12 environment.

First, If the entry is updated by a non-admin (i.e. by a student) then I believe that the approved status should be reset to 0 so that the teacher has to re-approve the entry. This would prevent a student from going back in and adding inappropriate content after the teacher has approved it. It would be nice if upon adding or updating an entry in which an approval is pending that an option be available for the teacher to receive an email of such. I have added this as MDL-8377.

Second, I think that if an entry is edited and needs to be re-approved, in large databases there must be a way for keeping that entry from getting lost. To prevent this, I would suggest one of two solutions, either reset the date entry time when it is edited (similar to the way a forum post is handled when it is edited) or add a sort option to sort by Approval/Date Entered such that the oldest entries waiting on approval appear first on the list (of course this could be toggled using the ASC/DESC options. My preference would be for the second option of adding another sorting option.

In working with the JSEA, they are wanting to use a database to store resumes for those looking for work at one of the Jesuit schools. The question of being able to unapprove (essentially hide) an entry is important. We occasionally run into this with the Modules and Plugins database. I can envision scenarios where a site admin or teacher may want to unapprove or hide something yet not really want to delete it. In the example of the resume database, while I may want to "expire" some resumes as being out of date, for research purposes or other reasons, I may want to hold on to that data and keep it within Moodle. I believe the first and second points that I had previously mentioned have been addressed. I believe you can sort by approval status. But this raises another question about language or at least a bit of a usability issue. Is it really that we are approving an issue or simply tagging it has being visible as opposed to hidden. If that is the case, then the entries should have the same edit, delete, hide/show icons. Is there any way to get this moved up so that it might be included in Moodle 2.0? I am going to add Olli to this issue and invite him to comment when the time is right as part of his GSOC work. Peace - Anthony

While this first surfaced back in 1.6, I am adding 1.9 to the affected versions so that it does not get forgotten. I have also tagged it as a usability issue, added Olli as watcher, and invite him to comment when appropriate as part of his GSOC work. Peace - Anthony