Mail from Course Members Gallery

1 Initial Problem

In Blended Learning Scenarios in Tutors rely on closely monitoring on- and offline participation of course members and communication with members and facilitating communication among members.
Currently the option of mailing to a member of a course from the Members Gallery is quite hidden:

1. User has to click on the picture or the user name. 
2. ILIAS presents the profile (or the portfolio, then the next step is not possible)
3. User has to find and click that tiny link in the upper corner to "Send Message" . 
4. ILIAS presents Mail-Form 
5. User writes and sends Mail. 
6. ILIAS returns User to the Course Member Gallery. 

2 Conceptual Summary

It should be easy to contact a specific member of the course. In order to help this online interaction, we suggest providing the possibility to individually send mails from Course Members Gallery, as they can be visually recognized on this view.

3 User Interface Modifications

It would be nice if members are shown extended entries in the Members Gallery:

• Link to a mail form adressed to the respective member
• Request Contact as it is already implemented 
• Access to Personal Profil as it is already implemented

3.1 List of Affected Views

• Corses / Groups > Members > Members Gallery 

3.2 User Interface Details

Upon clicking on "Send Mail", ILIAS presents the Mail form. 
After writing and sending the Mail, the user is redirected to the Members Gallery. 

3.3 New User Inteface Concepts

No new Concept, this suggestion users KS: Cards

4 Technical Information

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]
• Maintainer: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]
• Implementation of the feature is done by: Jansen, Michael [mjansen] and Killing, Alexander [alex]

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ...

7 Discussion

Killing, Alexander [alex], 7 Nov 2016: We should consider to use the User Action Service (and to put this service to the next level). This would allow to add a lot more other actions (e.g. chat) to the members gallery. Challenge would be to handle the "dynamically" changing contact button which would be a drop down entry in an actions menu then.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], Nov 07, 2016: We appreciate the feature request and schedule it for 5.3. Following Alexander's suggestion we would like to use the User Action Service for this feature and to add an 'Actions' menu with 'Send Mail' and other possible actions like 'Create group' or 'Shared Resources'. We would like to use the 'Deck of Cards' UI element for the member card.

Killing, Alexander [alex], 17 Mar 2017: After trying this out in our patch, I would strongly advise to have only one action drop down and to move the contact request actions into this drop down, too. Depending on the space, the second button moves into the next line and in general it feels strange to have a "general" action drop down directly beside a specialized contact button/drop down.

8 Implementation

Test Cases

Test cases completed at 2017-04-06 by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]

• 18386: Benutzer-Aktionen für Mitgliedergalerie in Administration konfigurieren
• 18387: Mail-Aktion für Mitgliedergalerie im Kurs konfigurieren
• 18388: Mail über die Mitgliedergalerie versenden

Approval

Approved at {20.07.2017} by {}.