Students need an intuitive way to view information about their classes, and easily find supplemental material, and locate important class announcements. This rendition makes it easy to see which classes you are currently taking. In the middle of the screen when you load up oncourse, there will be various boxes lined from top to bottom where your classes are clearly listed. Once you click on your class, the side bar on the left remains in tact, allowing you to click on large, easily legible boxes that can take you to your gradebook, the chat room, etc. When you want to change the main lineup of classes, you can click on the “Edit Classes” button directly below the boxes, popping up a window where much smaller listings appear of other classes. It will only display enough information for you to be able to identify which class is which, allowing for more boxes to be displayed on the screen. Just like on the mac operating system, it doesn’t matter if you have 10 other classes, or 100, the boxes of the “Edit Classes” tab will auto organize to the most ideal size to the amount of classes that exist. With this “Edit Classes” window opened, if you see a class you want to add, you simply click and hold, then drag this box to the main screen and drop. When you bring the class box out of the “Edit Classes” window, it will automatically become larger when brought to the main screen. Instead of having a delete button, you can drag directly over old classes, release, and it will replace it. If you want to simply add another class, you can hold the box inbetween two classes, and a line will appear showing you where it will reside after releasing your mouse. All other information such as help, contacting oncourse, etc, will be listed at the bottom of the screen in the least distracting way possible, since those features will be much less used during a typical oncourse session. In addition, on the left tab displaying pertinent class information, you can organize the order in which they are listed by simply dragging and dropping as well. To logout, this button will remain in the top right and will be on its own, and easy to identify.
November 10, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Kevin! i really like the bottom, first off, with the “help” etc. content. Since it is rarely used it should not take up important space and a lot of websites put their contact information in a footer on the bottom so users may think to look down there. Great idea!
I also like the way that grades/resources/chat etc are offered on the left.
The only thing I am not sure about is that the steps a user still has to take to navigate to where they want still might be confusing. Will only one class be expanded at a time? and if you click “Grades” for your I300 class then switch to I211 is grades what you see first?
Overall, good job. I definitely see us using some of your ideas incorporated into our final design!!
November 10, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Kevin,
I like the design on the site. I like the idea of the boxes. I am trying to figure where you came up with that.
For the bottom part, I like it, but I feel that it could have a better place for it and be more hidden rather than have it display at all times. They could pop up or display with an Edit bottom.
I also like the mac like interaction. I love the fact that the mac can do that and I wish more websites would have that interaction.
I like the rest of it. good job. I give you a B+
November 10, 2008 at 10:13 pm
This idea seems to solve almost all of the most urgent problems with navigation, tabs, and process of their customizing on the Oncourse. So I only have very narrow comments considering this solution. Do we need the left toolbar with Grades, Resources, Chat room, and etc. right on the start page? The start page displays the list of the courses, and I assume that no course is chosen by this moment. What is going to be returned if I click on the resources, for instance, right on the start page? Should the left toolbar be displayed after the course is chosen?
Besides that, this solution seems very logical and consistent; here are the strongest points I want to highlight:
• The sense of control and feasibility, so I know where I am, where should I go and I also know where the lecture, lab, or discussion tabs are.
• Flexibility (it can work with any number of courses)
• The ability to customize the workspace
• Consistency with the previous design of the Oncourse, so it shouldn’t take people too much efforts to get used to the new design