Enables Visible Groups filter dropdown list.

[michael-milette]

With this fix, the Visible Groups dropdown menu now has a filtering effect on what appears in the page when you selected a particular group. This is very useful when you have many groups.

Signed-off-by: Michael Milette michael.milete@instruxmedia.com

[ndunand]

Hello, Not sure to understand how this is useful. Students would first chose the group they wish to join in the dropdown, then the page reloads displaying only 1 option, then they would make their choice?

[michael-milette]

Hi Nicolas,

In a small classroom environment, this would not make sense. However it might help students find a particular group in a situation where you have a perpetual course and could end up with many groups, especially for people with disabilities (example, using screen readers).

For example, I might have a perpetual 1-week topics format course with a group for each week of the year. That's 52 groups. Students would be encouraged to join the group for the week in which they want to take the course. In these situations, if the student already knows the group they are looking for, they could just use the dropdown list to filter the page instead of reading or listening to it all.

Another example might be if someone, like a group leader, wanted to just print (I know, but some people still do this) the list of students in a particular group. They might not want to print off pages of groups just to get the one they are looking for. This is why the filtering idea is better than a jump list that would just take you to that part of the page.

I know - it always amazes me how creative people can be in finding new ways to use plugins.

Although this dropdown list exists in In the current version of the plugin, it doesn't do anything. This is confusing to anyone who tries to use it. Since you took the trouble to already include the dropdown list, I simply gave it functionality. An alternative solution would be to hide the dropdown list when it doesn't do anything.

I think it is useful feature. It is there for people who want to use it but doesn't force people to use it.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Michael

[ndunand]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the details. However, I think the students can't see the dropdown list. This dropdown is a standard Moodle feature allowing teachers to view only one group when using an activity which is set to use "separate groups" or "visible groups" mode.

So this could be somewhat useful to teachers, but not to students in my opinion.

Moreover, the functionality would be quite different than how the same dropdown works for instance in a forum, so I'm not sure whether this would confuse users (i.e. teachers) even more?

[michael-milette]

Actually the students do see the dropdown list:

The people I've spoken to find it useful but I will leave it up to you.

Best regards,

Michael

[ndunand]

Right, I used the "separate groups" setting by mistake, which of course the students can't see.

Alright the, if the setting was already visible (in "visible groups" mode anyway), I can't think of any reason why not to do this.

[michael-milette]

Thank you!