Feature Wiki

Information about planned and released features

Tabs

Learning Progress for Forum

Page Overview

[Hide]

1 Initial Problem

Participating actively in a forum discussion could be part of a course scenario. In this case you might want to trigger the learning progress status for such activities, too. Unfortunately, the forum object does not support learning progress. This should be changed with this feature request.

2 Conceptual Summary

The forum component shall use the learning progress service and offer an option "Contributed to Discussion" to set a learning progress status. Trigger for the learning progress (LP) is the number of written postings. If three postings are required as minimum, the LP status of a forum is set to "Completed" (green) when a user has made three or more postings.

The forum gets a new tab "Learning Progress" which is placed between "Moderators" and "Statistics". It comes with the known sub-tabs "Users", "Summary" and "Settings" – if related permissions are given:

  • Users without permissions "View learning progress or other users" and "Edit Learning Progress" are treated as "learners" and see just their own learning progress (if LP is activated) with information about "Mode" and "Status" (incl. caption).
  • Users with permission "View learning progress or other users" see tabs "Users" and "Summary", incl. LP status information about all users that have already made at least one posting (users that only read postings are ignored by LP).
  • Users with permission "Edit Learning Progress" see tabs "Users" (with their own LP status) and "Settings".

Tab "Settings" has a form offering a "Mode" with two options:

  • Learning progress is deactivated
    • (Byline) The learning progress status is not displayed and does not influence parent objects.
  • Contributed to discussion
    • (Byline) The learning progress status will be determined by the number of written postings.
      • (Key-Input) Minimum number of postings [__] Postings

The following activities are changing the number of postings which are considered to calculate the learning progress status of a user:

  • Censored postings : in case a posting of a user is censored, the posting is not counted for the learning progress status.
  • Moved thread : in case a thread is moved to another forum, all included postings are no longer counted for the learning progress status.
  • Unapproved postings : if "Approve Postings" has been activated for a forum, unapproved posting are not yet considered for calculating the learning progress status.
  • Deleted posting / thread : deleted postings or threads with postings of a user are no longer considered for calculating the learning progress status.

If one of the above mentioned actions push the number of postings of a user under the required minimum number of postings, an already assigned learning progress status "passed" can be set back to "in progress".

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

  • Forum » Learning Progress (new tab)
  • Forum » Learning Progress » User
  • Forum » Learning Progress » Summary
  • Forum » Learning Progress » Settings

3.2 User Interface Details

  • All views of the described subtabs are reusing the default presentations of "Learning Progress" tabs.
  • Tab "Learning Progress", table "Show Participants" (only "learner" view, see chap. 2))
    • Form with key-value-pairs for
      • Mode (Contributed to discussion | Deactivated)
      • Status
        • Not Attempted = No postings written yet
        • In Progress = Not reached minimum of postings yet
        • Completed = Minimum of postings reached
        • (no Failed status)
  • Tab "Users", table "Show Participants":
    • Default presentation
  • Tab "Summary", table "Summary":
    • Default presentation
  • Tab "Settings", form "Learning Progress Settings"
    • Option "Mode" with radio boxes for
      • Learning progress is deactivated (default)
        • (Byline) The learning progress status is not displayed and does not influence parent objects.
      • Contributed to discussion
        • (Byline) The learning progress status will be determined by the number of written postings.
          • (Key-Input) Minimum number of postings [__] Postings

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

No new UI elements

3.4 Accessibility Implications

The feature request reuses the existing legacy implementation of the learning progress service. No known new accessibility issues will be introduced. But possible existing accessibility problems of the existing service could not be tackled for this feature alone.

4 Technical Information

The original requests has suggested to add a new column for the number of postings to the LP views "Users" and "Summary". Due to technical restrictions it is not possible to add additional columns to the LP views. Therefore, we drop this suggestion and re-use the default view of the LP status. The number of written postings is visible on the "Statistics" tab.

5 Privacy Information

The information about the number of postings made by one user is already presented in tab "Statistics". The ILIAS learning progress for a user in a forum object will be addtionally stored in database table 'ut_lp_marks'. No additional data is stored.

6 Security Implications

None

7 Contact

8 Funding

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

  • KIT

9 Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 14 JUN 2021: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 8.

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], 21 AUG 2021: Due to the restructuring of the Learning Progress test suite, completing the test cases according to the new scheme will still take a while. This is why the feature is already merged to trunk without having test cases yet.

10 Implementation

Implemented as desribed above.

In addition to the described changes we decided to extend the 'Statistics' view in the forum by adding a new column with the known learning progress indicator and text (if the learning progress is enabled).

The learning progress for a specific forum will be determined for the following events:

  • Posting Created
  • Posting Deleted
  • Posting Censored
  • Revoked Posting Censorship
  • Posting Activated/Approved by Moderator
  • Thread Moved
  • Thread Merged
  • Thread Deleted
  • Learning Progress Mode Changed (Deactivated -> Contributions to Discussion -> Deactivated ...)

Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

Approval

Approved at 17 AUG 2021 by Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel].

Last edited: 21. Aug 2021, 10:25, Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]