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learning-unlimited / ESP-Website

A website to help manage the logistics of large, short-term educational programs
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Showing class length in the lottery #438

Open jhurwitz opened 11 years ago

jhurwitz commented 11 years ago

A suggestion from a Splash student:

Would it be possible to put the length of each class next to the listing for the class on the lottery page? Right now, you can only see it under the blocks it conflicts with.

gkanwar commented 11 years ago

Quick note on this: I looked into this during Splash and it will actually require either a non-constant lookup for each class, or changing/adding a field to the JSON views that the lottery uses. Most likely the latter option is better. Whoever makes this change should make sure to look at wherever else the JSON view is used, and avoid breaking things.

alexcole commented 11 years ago

If we are adding things into the lottery interface: we should really add in a way for students to view descriptions, prereqs, and difficulties as well. I think that a tooltip that comes up with this info would be really sweet.

gkanwar commented 11 years ago

@alexcole This feature exists. There's a "More Info" link next to each class that pops up exactly that sort of tooltip.

alexcole commented 11 years ago

Oops. My bad. Well maybe we should make it bigger then because students don't seem to be using it (most students I talked to had a flow where they read the entire catalog, made a ginormous spreadsheet, and then entered that into the lottery).

gkanwar commented 11 years ago

Mmm, that's true.

Random thought -- what if we came up with an instructions page which gave a suggested workflow for signing up for classes? This way we don't just throw resources like the lottery page/catalog and students and have them figure out how best to synthesize all the data into some set of interests/priorities.

alexcole commented 11 years ago

Yeah, that could be cool. I think it is really just an expansion of what the checkboxes in student reg are supposed to do (but don't seem to). We could have full sentences (instead of short) in student reg that get checked off as you complete them. So it would be like:

  1. Go to the lottery and check off the classes you find interesting (and be sure to read the descriptions!)
  2. Wait until foo to get results
  3. Modify your schedule below
  4. Buy meal tickets (Optional, but must happen before payment) and so on.

We might want to make a new issue for this or something.

jhurwitz commented 11 years ago

what if we came up with an instructions page

Our students aren't always the smartest. Some won't find a separate instructions page. We should ideally make instructions dead obvious and be an integral part of the process that you can't miss no matter how hard you try. But yeah, that's a separate issue from this one.

Also, ++alexcole.

alexcole commented 11 years ago

Okay, I put the changed checkboxes/instructions idea into a new issue at Issue #531