Atutor.no

We get a lot of feedback from our users, and a very clear pattern is that the users wish to be notified of different things that happens in the platform that is of relevance to them.

For instance they love the ability to subscribe to forums, announcements, and messages / inbox (allthough they seldom find out how to subscribe to the last one).

They most often say that they want an e-mail when this and that happens, which would be fine, but I don't think that sending all these e-mails is the best solution, neither the one that scales the best.

An activity / notification feed for ATutor

This has led me to think that we need some kind of activity feed or notification feed in ATutor, as popularized by Facebook and their notifications (you need to be logged in to Facebook to see this page), and Basecamps dashboard or project overview.

Here's a recent screenshot of my latest Facebook notifications:

The "items" (like photo / status / user) and "actions" (comments / likes) would be different in ATutor, and that leads to my questions to Atutor users and developers:

• What are the items and actions in Atutor that should be included in such a stream?
• How could we technically and design-wise implement this in ATutor?

We are hiring again, and will thus have two developers available to work on ATutor in the not-so-distant future, and this is one of the things we wish to prioritize. We're willing to do all of this work, get it into core and maintain it, given that we and ATRC agree on how it should be done. And yes, we know that this is a massive task!

Here's my initial thoughts on the two points above, please add your comments in the comment field!

Items and actions in ATutor

First, there are different items and actions depending on your status. Regular students need to see some things, while assistants needs to see other things, depending on their priviledge. The colored things in brackets are links and / or generic terms, comments in italic.

For normal students:

For the communication tools

• You got a [new message] from [user] (inbox)
• [User] wrote [new post title] in [forum name]
• [User] replied to [post title] in [forum title]
• [announcement title] was posted in [course name]
• [user] wrote [blog post title] in [blog title]
• [user] commented on [blog post title] in [blog title]
• [user] uploaded [file name] in file storage.
• [user] uploaded a revision of [file name] in file storage
• [user] commented on [file name] in file storage

For tests and assignments

• test [test name] is now available.
• test [test name] closes in 3 (?) days
• assignment [assignment name] closes in 3 (?) days
• [certificate name] is ready for download (our module, not yet released)

For content

• [content title] is now available (given that a release date is set)
• [forum title] was added (when creating a brand new forum)
• new [poll name] is relased
• [FAQ] is updated with [FAQ question]
• [Links] are updated with [link title]
• [Reading list] is updated with [resource name]

For courses

• [course name] is available (given release date is set)
• [course name] closes in 7 days (given end date is set)

In addition we will need some feed items that are specific for instructors or assistants with a given privilege, like:

• [user] requested enrollment in [course name]
• [user] answered [test title]
• [user] submittet [assignment title]

I have probably forgotten some as well.

How to implement it technically and design-wise

This is the hard part, and I basically have no idea what the best way to start would be. Initially I'm thinking that each module or core function that needs to feed into this notification stream should publish it's own customized RSS file, and that the notification stream function should read and process / sort these after some rules. Some things most of the RSS feeds would need are:

• Date (always needed for sorting)
• Item (announcement title, blog post title, forum title, forum post title etc.)
• Item link (the URL to the item)
• User name (if needed in the stream)
• Action type (like "commented" or "posted" / "wrote" or "submitted" or "requested" or "uploaded" etc)
• Course name
• More?

The placement is pretty much a given I think, this fits perfectly on a slightly redesigned user start page. Not in it's own sub page though, as I want it up front! We may want to add a feature for admins to turn this off and on.

I also belive the items should be sorted by date, with the most recent items on top. Alternatively it could be sorted by course name, then date.

And I believe we should have a cap on it, so you would at the most see the 20 / 30 / 50 (?) latest items.

Another important thing to think about is how we create the translation terms, as there are many different ways to write messages like this in different languages.

New modules would have to be able to use this so we would need to describe how they can. This should be a part of the module documentation.

How it fits in with the original user feedback

As I started with, our users crave notifications, and they also want them by e-mail. I don't think we should remove the e-mail notifications that are allready in place in ATutor, but you should also be able to get the notification stream in e-mail, I think LinkedIn does this really well:

The user would need the ability to set when this should be sent, like for instance:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Biweekly

Random other thoughts

First of all, ATutor just implemented the Open Social framework as a module. As far as I know it's also the first open source application that has done this - kudos for that!

I don't know the Open Social specs very well, but if this specification can be used to create the other feeds we need that would be really nice! Also, the ATutor Social module allready has an activity feed, and this is a feed I typically would like to include in a more general and site-wide feed.

So, comments are open! What would it take to implement this? What is a realistic time range to get it implemented? What have I missed? Or am I on the wrong track alltogether? :)

Subscribe to announcement newsfeed
I've been chanting about this announcement subscription hack of mine on the official forums for the better part of six months now. Why? Because I never could get this quite simple thing to install as it should on our production server, and when it finally did, it didn't work properly. However, after the introduction of the Patcher (thanks to Cindy) I revisited this once again, and it now seems to both install and function flawlessly. I've made the announcement subscription hack available as a patch which is ready to install on 1.6.1.

What this patch does is give members the option to subscribe to the announcement newsfeed in courses they are enrolled in, and then email them whenever a new announcement is made, much like the very similar functionality in the forums. The mail that is sent out uses the format_content() function in ATutor to parse HTML if the announcement contains any.

The patch automatically fixes the index.tmpl.php file in the default theme, and the newest ATutor-redux theme already has its index.tmpl.php file set up to handle this patch, but if you use a different theme you will need to add a few lines to this file:

New and improved directory
Responding to feedback from both users and superusers here at NST, I've created a new and improved member directory, also available as a patch for 1.6.1. I ended up tossing the old filter functions out the window and replacing them with a search bar which responds to usernames, first-, second,- and last names, phone numbers, group titles, and email adresses if these are set to public. The search bar uses ajax to display the results so everything looks very sleek and sezzy, but there is also a search button should javascript be disabled.

The new directory introduces two new javascripts, two new template files and a completely rewritten directory.php. One of the javascripts (xmlhttp.js) could be of some future interest, as this is where the XMLhttpObject is created and handled, and thus could be used for more ajax functionality should this be desired. Its found in /jscripts/ and is included by the new template files. The template files are only included into the default template, but since they don't already exist they should then be automagically be included in any templates where they aren't present. I encourage theme-makers to have a look-see at the theme files (directory.tmpl.php and directory.search.tmpl.php) because there is no doubt in my mind that they can still be improved upon, and I've left some explainatory comments in there so it shouldn't be very hard to understand. In fact, we're already planning some minor changes to go with the ATutor-redux theme.

Oh, and yes, both of these patches will of course be installed on our demo install of ATutor once we get that up and running :)