apluslms
Redesign/improve the UX of the participants list
The student list in the teacher UI could be better in the number of ways. Below are some related points. (Mass-course teachers could probably come up with more.) Sorry, this is a bit of a “multi-issue”, but these concerns are related and might be addressed with a wholesale redesign. This may be a partial duplicate with one or more existing issues. (?)
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[ ] Some group operations are carried out by having students checked and then clicking on one of the widgets on the right which appears to be connected to just one of the students, not all selected students!. Some of those operations do not even ask for confirmation before operating on potentially hundreds of students (e.g., adding a student tag, which, if applied incorrectly to a bunch of people, can lead to a big mess). The interface is unintuitive at best and dangerous at worst.
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[ ] Further adding to the confusion & danger, it’s possible to have students checked that aren’t even visible on the page! (Check some students first, then filter.) Combined with the previous bullet, this means that triggering an operation (e.g., add tag) on a student, might cause virtually undetectable effects on students who aren’t even shown in the view.
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[ ] One of the common things to do on that page is to check "How many students of type X do we have? What about type Y?". Presently, that requires selecting a tag for type X or Y, clicking the top checkbox and then seeing the number of selected students. (After each such action, it’s very wise to reload the entire page — slow! — in order to pre-empt any future disasters that might otherwise derive from having students checked; see above.) It would be nice if the page always displayed a count of how many students are listed below (without having to select all those students).
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[ ] Could the Pending students be shown by default? That is, could the Pending checkbox be checked by default like the Active checkbox already is? The fact that it isn’t has caused confusion and miscommunication multiple times, in cases where it initially seemed that a student had not registered at all but later turned out that they had "started enrolling" but been left in the Pending state. (Relatedly, students in the Pending state could be differently colored in the list; e.g., written in gray and/or with a different background.)
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[ ] We now have a few checkboxes for statuses (Active, ...), which produce intersections ("or"). We also have student tags, which produce unions ("and"). What I’d ideally like to see is three-state buttons similar to what we already have in Jutut (message filtering) that effectively enable reasonably sophisticated Boolean queries like "give me all the students with tag X and tag Y but no tag Z".
