Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

Re: Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

by Vaya Willemen -
Number of replies: 4
I agree with Brad. It is very annoying and it involves a lot of scrolling or clicking to get an activity or a section in the correct place. It is indeed possible to drag the activities to the correct position on the page, but when you have an entire course, consisting of a lot of material stretched out over several screens it is annoying to have to use the cross. Also it does not always respond well. I have to get things in position in three or more tries. First drag it up to the top of the page, scroll the page, drag it again, scroll again, ....

Also, multiple select is missing in this case. It would be so helpful to be able to select multiple activities that need to be moved together to a new place in the course.

If I now create three new activities (belonging together, about the same subject, e.g. a document, an exercise and a quiz) they all appear at the bottom. I have to then repeat the dragging to the correct position three times.
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In reply to Vaya Willemen

Re: Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers
Vaya,

Do you know that you can left-click on the four-arrow icon instead of dragging it and a menu will pop up showing you all the possible places to move to ?

The drag and drop is dreadful: it almost never works right across pages. I have up on it long ago. I always use the Move pop up method instead.

Attachment screenshot_9760.jpg
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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

by Vaya Willemen -

Hello Randy,

I am fully aware of that option. But it is equally dreadfull in courses where there are 5 teachers teaching the same kind of topics to 15 different classgroups across different programmes. In that list you show, and which is so 'clean' in you screenshot, the info in my case cannot be displayed on a single screen. All the items from other lecturers/programmes that are not visible to my students, are in that list, in the same font and colour as the items that are visible to my students and where my new content needs to fit in.

At least with the drag and drop method, I see the grey font color and restriction descriptions in front of me as I drag the item to its correct position. And yes, when I release it more often than not still ends up wrong, and I have to go looking for that item ...

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In reply to Vaya Willemen

Re: Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers
Okay, just checking. Lots of folks have no idea that click thing exists.

Personally, I would rather the old system we had before the ajax drag and drop came along: it put a block with an arrow next to each possible target location to move to, then you click the target block you want and it moves it, correctly, first time, every time.

Drag and drop of activities is one of those things that looks nice but is very inefficient to use: eye candy all the cool kids have on their web sites but a real nightmare to use in large courses.
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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Creating items in the middle of a Section or Course

by Vaya Willemen -

Hey Randy,

For "fun" I tested how long the list is that I get when I click a cross to select where in between existing activities a new activity needs to come. My list is 12 screens long because there are 166 activities already present in that course. 🤪

Nowadays with a lot of distance learning, students can study at their own pace. Not all students are at the same point in a course. Some students not grasping a specific something asks me via a forum for extra info, I develop a new activity (for example for student self assessment) based on their questions, and it is pertaining a topic smack bang in the middle of those 166 already present.

So I guess I am stuck with the eye-candy nightmare. Hopefully there will be a solution in the future for this usability issue.


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