New: Admin-Controlled Mandatory / Optional Text Blocks
Oct 18, 2021
As the Outline project has grown, so too have the requirements of faculties and users. One common issue editors and administrators have experienced is ensuring the correct required policy / informational text for their Faculty or Department was being added to course outlines.
So far this has been handled by telling editors to check their start-of-term package, and have the information from that PDF / Word Document copied and pasted into the user-editable policy block, but that’s not always an obvious step, and as groups look to adopt the software as a mandatory tool we need a more rigorous method of attaching required text to outlines.
For Instructors / Editors
Mandatory Content
For any courses that are part of a faculty or department that has configured Mandatory Content, that content will automatically be added to your course outline, and not editable.
In some cases there may be conflicts. For instance, in a cross-listed MATH / BIOL course, where administrators have set up Mandatory Content for all of MATH courses, BIOL courses, and SCIENCE faculty. However, only a single mandatory content can be applied to an outline, as much of this content may overlap.
By default, the course outline will select the “deepest” Mandatory Content (BIOL is a child of SCIENCE faculty, MATH is a child of MATHEMATICS faculty, so they will be chosen over SCIENCE which has no parent). In a case of multiple equal-depth options, the first one (by course order in the outline) will be selected.
Any time more than one option is available to editors, they will be able to select the best option via a dropdown.
Mandatory Content blocks will automatically get updated (if the administrators update or delete the content) up until the time that the outline is published. After that, the content is “stamped” onto the outline and can no longer be changed.
Optional Content
Optional content will simply show up as buttons next to an editable text block. Clicking these buttons will simply append the content to your existing edits. Optional content can be edited and reordered as editors see fit, similar to copying and pasting.
For Admins
Domain Management
We have now made it possible for faculty or departmental administrators to access the permissions dashboard which will allow viewing and editing settings and permissions for different domains. As part of this new functionality, we’ve also added Managed Content to domain settings.
A domain is a nested collection of permissions attached to certain courses.
For example, the Science domain includes a child domain for Physics [PHYS *], Chemistry [CHEM *] etc. Someone with the permission to edit outlines in Science will automatically have that same permission in any child domains.
Mandatory / Optional Content
Managed Content is a collection of Mandatory and Optional blocks of text which can be attached to a specific “key”. For now we only have one key for each (Standard Template Mandatory and Standard Template Optional), but these keys tell the course outlines which content is available to be inserted and where.
For each domain, only one mandatory content can be set per key. This content can be created, edited, or deleted by anybody with the content permission in a given domain or parent domain.
It is currently recommended that your hierarchy decide whether to do a faculty-level mandatory policy, or individual department-level ones, and avoid having Both. If both faculty-level and department-level mandatory content applies to the same course, the department-level will be used by default, and the user will need to manually select one or the other during editing!
Optional Content works differently in that a domain can have many optional content options for the same “key”. All optional content for all domains will be presented to editors, and they will be able to append blocks they deem applicable to their course outline.
That’s it! We will be deploying these new features over the next couple days in order to provide time for administrators to decide how best to use these new tools before instructors start preparing their W22 course outlines!
I will be in touch with admins this week to help work out any roughness and help configure these new options