Usability improvement in adding members to team solution

1 Requirements

When learners want to add new members to a team solution, they often find that a particular person cannot be added to the team because he is already a member in his own one-person-team. It seems that ILIAS creates these one-person-teams as soon as a learner clicks the "Submit Solution" button, even if he does not actually submit anything.
 
We suggest to change the behavior as follows:

• If an exercise has been configured to allow team solutions, the learners should see a "Create Team" button first.
• The "Submit Solution" button should be disabled or invisible until the learner has successfully created a new team or been added to an existing team by someone else.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Release 5.0
• Funding: FH Münster
• Maintainer: Alex Killing
• Implementation of the feature is done by Leifos
• Contract settled: Yes
• Tested by / status:

3 Additional Information

Contact the following persons if you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding:
• Information about concept:
• Information about funding: Klaus Zimmermann, k.zimmermann@fh-muenster.de
• Information about implementation:

4 Discussion

@Jörg: What is your opinion on this?

JL, 11 Apr 2014: I think it is a very good idea to make the team handling more explicit. We already improved team assignments in 4.4 but a clear distinction of team management and upload(s) would be a logical next step.
With all the discussion about [[[Project] Concept for Learning Communities]] maybe we should also think about how single-user-workflows could be refactored to enable teams / groups of users - team assignments would be a prime example.

JF 28 Apr 2014: We support the idea and schedule it for 4.5.

Matthias Kunkel, 16 Jan 2015: I had a look at this feature and think it is a good improvement. Nevertheless, I suggest to use a dedicated lang var on the screen below to notify the user that he does not belong to a team, see Mantis #15246.
 
And to be honest - I do not understand how a user can invite other users to his team...

Matthias Kunkel, 16 Jan 2015: Alexandra explained me how to add team members: you have first to click on "Hand in" and then you see a tab for "Team" and one for the "Team Log". Why there is no direct link from the row "Team Members" to the tab "Team"? And why is the tab title not called "Team Members", too (and uses probably the same lang var as the table header)?

JF 19 Jan 2015: We agree that a "Manage Team" button should be included on the main assignment screen.

Seiler, Yvonne [yvseiler] 24 Feb 2016: Often users click on the "Create Team" button and do not realize, that they already created a "one-person-group" (as described in this feature wiki entry above). Now it's the problem, that this person cannot be added to a team from another user. First he/she has to "delete" him-/herself from his/her one-person-group over the button "Manage Team". Wouldn't it be meaningful, if there would be a second button "Remove me from team" or a similar one? Or a button "Delete Team" if there is only me in the team? It's happened very fast, that someone makes a team, although he/she wanted only to "see" what's behind this button "Create team". What's your opinion about this?

Klaus Zimmermann, FH Münster, 24 Feb 2016: We observed this too, but we consider it a minor usability issue.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], Feb 29, 2016: Jörg will add an additional ‘Delete Team’ button as usability fix for 5.0 / 5.1. The button is shown until a first file has been uploaded.

5 Implementation

JL 03 Sep 2014: This feature has been implemented in 4.5/trunk.

Klaus Zimmermann 08.10.2014: We tested and accepted the feature.