Thursday 25 October 2007

Oh no! New grouping procedure means new course names needed!

This is turning into a bit of a nightmare because the groups/classes don't function properly.

Obviously having 3 copies of the same course is not the ideal solution and I've just stumbled across another problem. When naming the 5 letter course code I've added a T for the teachers metacourse and now that I've had to make the same course for year 10 in my area, I've stumbled across the repeated name issue, as two courses can't be called P1a29.

On a small scale like this I could name a course H1a29 as there is no course that will exist with that name but on a whole school scale this will obviously clash with some subject called history whatever that is.

Any ideas?

4 comments:

mini-Andy said...

Perhaps it would be better to have a course code based entirely on the teacher teaching.

In this case you would call it aho01, aho02 etc, as the main course in the teacher site should be the only one with the official unit name and as teachers are in charge of their own course, sourcing from the main teacher-area course then the course name should reflect the ownership of the course by the teacher. Unfortunately this loses any course identifying tags, but it's neater and on a whole school roll-out it is a much easier protocol to adopt than some course specific thing, especially as the geography department etc will have some weird naming convention no doubt.

mini-Andy said...

Main course with the main resources on it should be p29, p210 etc, while teachers should name their courses with their initials.

This would mean teachers can create their courses without holding up the course process and the courses remains Aryan pure.

Sabir Leafar said...

I think this is the key issue to organising the site properly, so let us take some time to think about it. The way I see it, there are two basic solutions, one more student-friendly and one more teacher-friendly.
Student-friendly:
GCSE Physics - Year 11 - 11D2 - Unit 9 (which links to the big metacourse Unit 9 hidden somewhere)

Teacher-friendly:
Mr Ribas - 11D2 Physics - Unit 9 (again taken from the big meta).

Ok, the second one seems to have fewer levels (although would you put it in a GCSE Science container folder?)
The most worrying conclusion about this is that it is likely we have to take our current structure and put some BBQ sauce on it to make it easier to swallow...

mini-Andy said...

I think that the second option is fairly friendly anyway, but I think that there is a third solution which bridges that gap

Year 11 > Ribas > 11D2, 11D3 etc

I think that this gives the puils a chance to find their class easily and also allows the teachers to pull up their own 11 classes too