Material available to people not on an Event: Independent runs through of material with recorded lectures, etc.

[alasdairwilson]

from hackathon:

if we provide a distinction between an event (current event) which is a hosted delivery of material for a cohort, e.g. the schmidt fellows and a course: which is something that is doable by anyone then we can open up a lot of the functionality of the site to "outsiders".

The idea behind is that someone can navigate to the right part of the material and say "i want to do this" and make their own event effectively where they work through it with all our interactivity alone.

The site might need to make a distinction between this, comments etc.? we could group them for everyone doing the same course?

In terms of UX, I guess we could have another card on the main page that has like "click here to start a course" and then you get a choice of what ones and from then on they appear in your sidebar, and in your timeline.

These could be manually curated, such as the schmidt material which covers content over a number of course categories but they also could just be our current "courses" which have a list of linked material already that we just need to split by e.g. programming language.

In terms of gutenberg changes that a solution for this might require:

• Add a way to advertise you can do this on the main page:
• Add a selection of courses (even if automatically all streams from each course). Custom user designed courses? Combination of courses into 1 "event"
• Add a way for a user to enrol on one and for that to display in their timeline (and sidebar which is easier)
• Decide what parts of the interactivity we want to keep? do we group all "independents" in one event where they can each see all comments? Do we remove comments? Execute this plan.
• This works best as well with recorded material that is embedded in the markdown (so would be good to get that done first)

[martinjrobins]

Could we do this fairly easily from the current setup with a flag for an event which can be either (a) normal event, or (b) self-study? The self-study events would allow anyone to enrol on them without a key, and would not display times for any of the event items (or perhaps just time from start). The recorded material could just be linked to like we do currently in event-items

We could have a separate section on the main page that lists all the self-study events

[alasdairwilson]

Yeah it could be that simple, here are some of my thoughts:

As in, there is an approach where we can add a flag for self study/organised event and then we have a LOT of places where we check this flag in order to check if anything to do with start time end time etc is valid. One place where this logic is somewhat easier to have a filtered list on the front page of self-study courses where it selects all these and shows them. I think in general though it makes sense to just make a new type although this also adds difficulty along the lines of activeEvent.

Some of the questions remain though, can they see each others comments? Do comments exist at all? Can admins/instructors see comments but not users (more branching logic) as a way to be able to gain feedback on the course. Maybe you only see your own comments on the markdown but the comment summary table still appears to admins/instructors on the event page.

I think it probably also warrants a overhaul of the sidebar event view as well as like you say we can link to recorded lectures in there but there isn't anyway to add this as an eventgroup, it would be good if there was like a "type" of eventgroup that was watch this lecture and then another work through these pages.

This issue also motivates the addition of a mark as completed button. Currently this is mostly unnecessary because courses are guided, tuesday is this material, wednesday this... not all material has problems which work as a pseudo progress tracker, and even those with problems might benefit from a mark as completed tickbox so you can see your progress in the sidebar go green as you work along. Show completed event items in green with a tick, If all eventitems in this eventgroup are completed set eventgroup to completed.

Anyway loads of scope here.