How to copy a subpage in a Lessons tool

[Fawei Geng]

Dear all,

 

In the Lessons tool, I can create a top level page by copying an existing top level Lessons page.  Does anyone know whether and how I can  copy a subpage?

 

Many thanks in advance.

 

Fawei

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Fawei Geng, FHEA CMALT MBCS

Learning Technology Support Officer
IT Services, University of Oxford 

13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN

Blog: http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/fawei/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/oxford4learning/

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[Fawei Geng]

Dear Christina and David,

 

Thank you both for the responses.   The reason I asked the question was that we had been trying to create site templates using the Lessons tool.  In the templates. each Lessons page (and subpages) has similar structure, style and headings.   We used the ‘Add More Page’ method to copy top level pages.   With Christina’s method, now we can copy subpages too J.    

 

I have to say that this feature is in the wrong place – how do you expect that ‘Reorder’ allows you to copy page!   Christina, I will never discover this feature without your help. Thank you.

 

All the best

 

Fawei

 

------------------------------------------------------------
Fawei Geng, FHEA CMALT MBCS

Learning Technology Support Officer
IT Services, University of Oxford 

13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN

Blog: http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/fawei/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/oxford4learning/

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From: Christina Schwiebert [mailto:cschw...@northweststate.edu]
Sent: 09 June 2015 13:40
To: Fawei Geng
Cc: sakai-dev; sakai-user
Subject: Re: [sakai-users] How to copy a subpage in a Lessons tool

 

Fawei,

 

We have always used the option to add items from another page, which is on the Reorder page, below the list of items. There, you can select which page you want to copy items from. Select the subpage you want to copy, and it will let you copy any or all of the items from that page. Hope this helps!

 

Christina

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Christina Schwiebert

Instructional Design and Distance Learning Coordinator

cschw...@northweststate.edu

419-267-1428

 

"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often" - Winston Churchill

 

"The thing about quotes on the internet is that you cannot confirm their validity." - Abraham Lincoln

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[Adam Marshall]

Why not propose a jira to move it to a better place?

 

You could make a proposal or 2 to the T&L group tomorrow and when we’ve all decided on the most sensible location, create a SAK and maybe Charles will address it in the future?

 

adam

 

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[Fawei Geng]

Agree, it will make better sense if it is under ‘Add More Pages’.    I will consult with the people on the T&L call tomorrow before making a JIRA.

 

Many thanks

 

Fawei

 

From: David Eveland [mailto:DEve...@johnsonu.edu]
Sent: 09 June 2015 14:43
To: Fawei Geng
Cc: Christina Schwiebert; sakai-dev; sakai-user
Subject: Re: [sakai-users] How to copy a subpage in a Lessons tool

 

Fawei, I agree that this feature is a great win to know about. But I also agree that it seems to be in the wrong place.

 

Perhaps a better location would be under the add more pages area of lessons, under a different heading such as "add or copy sub page content from other lessons"?

- Dave

[Charles Hedrick]

On Jun 9, 2015, at 9:26 AM, Fawei Geng <fawei...@it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

I have to say that this feature is in the wrong place – how do you expect that ‘Reorder’ allows you to copy page!   Christina, I will never discover this feature without your help. Thank you. 

I expected LEAP to include a recommendation for changing the UI for moving things. If I had been doing it myself, I would probably have had reorder simply unlock the main page to let you drag stuff on it, and added drag and drop to the index of pages.

For 11 I can certainly add an option to “add more pages” to copy a page and all subpages. It also wouldn’t be hard to make make add more pages work on pages other than top-level. How widely useful would that be?

One concern I have is that in site where content is shared on multiple pages, it’s hard to know what to do. We have designs where there’s some common material (e.g. background material) that is added as subpages in several different locations. When you copy pages you don’t want to make a separate copy of that material. Doing so could be very confusing, since the author might not realize that changes in one place aren’t reflected everywhere.

[Charles Hedrick]

I’ve had users ask for support for hiding tools, so students can only refer to them through Lessons.

As far as I know this works in forums and assignments. I’ve looked at Samigo. However it’s going to be very hard to do this for Samigo. The Samigo student view has lots of possibilities for a given assessment. Depending upon settings, it can be in both the takable assessments section and the submitted section. The submitted section can have grades, links, and feedback for multiple submissions. I don’t see any easy way to reflect this in Lessons without duplicating a lot of Samigo. But if I don’t provide everything that’s on the student view, I think students will be unhappy that they can’t get to it.

Lessons uses groups to control access to objects. Samigo understands groups, and thus should show only things that students can actually do. So I think it’s probably best not to hide it.

Lessons isn’t as smart about Samigo. We’ll show links that won’t work at times, simply because the logic within Samigo for figuring out when a student can actually take a test is not at all obvious. It seems safer to provide the link and let Samigo issue errors if a test isn’t available, is retracted for edit, etc.

[Charles Hedrick]

Copying a page makes an actual copy of the page. They can be edited independently. Currently copying a page does not copy any subpages. It simply omits them. There are two options we could conceivably do:

* copy the subpages, i.e. with a completely new copy that can be edited separately

* in the new page, put a pointer to the subpage from the original page. Then they’re the same page, and changes one place affect it everywhere.

There are uses for both approaches.

On Jun 17, 2015, at 1:32 PM, Jensen, Ann E <aj...@txstate.edu> wrote:

Thanks for this response, Charles. Can you clarify what happens when you copy a main Lessons page versus a subpage? As I understand it, a copy of a page is like an alias to the original version of the page: if you change the original, the copy will change also. However when you copy a subpage, Lessons makes a unique instance of that subpage. Is that correct?

 

From: sakai...@apereo.org [mailto:sakai...@apereo.org] On Behalf Of Charles Hedrick

Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2015 1:43 PM
To: Fawei Geng

[Adam Marshall]

I agree with this.

A new function could be added to lessons to 'create link to existing sub page' which sits alongside 'add subpage' for those situations where one shared copy of a sub page is desirable. The hard work would be implementing a 'sub page picker' where one selects the existing sub page (I guess).

I can envisage  a scenario of a shared page where every lessons tool instance in a site has a sub page called 'Report problems with this lesson'. This page would explain what to do if you discover an error in the lesson. Slightly artificial but I hope you get the idea.

I'm happy to do a JIRA if others agree

Adam

sent from my phone

On 18 Jun 2015 22:36, "Jensen, Ann E" <aj...@txstate.edu> wrote:

I would vote for making all copies of both pages and subpages completely unique versions. We have been tripped up in a couple of cases because we didn't realize that editing a subpage in one place would change the copy we had made of that subpage. We haven't encountered a use case that requires the current approach (copies of subpages are really aliases, not copies), but if one exists then clearer language in the UI would be helpful (for example call the copy of the subpage an alias, not a copy).

[Hedrick Charles]

Here’s what I plan to do, based on this discussion:

* Add pages will be clarified as “Add top-level page”, and will not have an option to copy the current page. It will appear only in top level pages, as now. Without this, there’s a hole in the functionality. You can create a new blank subpage using “add subpage.” But for top-level pages, there’s nothing above them where you could do this. You could do it in Site Info, but users didn’t expect that, and there would also be no way to create a whole set of pages at once (i.e. “week 1” through N), as there is in this function.

* A new function, copy page, will appear on all pages. There will be a checkbox for whether to copy the page only or copy the page and all subpages. While it works to combine this with “add page,” users would probably expect to copy pages with something called copy page. The new pages will be attached to the same place where the current page is.

* Add subpage will be unchanged. You can create a new one or make a link to an existing one. I think adding a copy page function to this is unexpected, and is best done as a separate copy page command.