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openlearningtools / opencompetencies

A tool for organizing educational competencies.
MIT License
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"School" should have a "public" attribute #10

Open ehmatthes opened 11 years ago

ehmatthes commented 11 years ago

Schools need to be public or private. Public schools should be listed under /schools/, with a meaningful sort.

lyndsysimon commented 11 years ago

Does this refer to their visibility within the application, or their organizational status?

ehmatthes commented 11 years ago

Interesting question, I hadn't even thought of that connotation.

It's strictly their visibility within the application. Schools need to have the opportunity to be private while they are developing their system. I believe the end goal is to have as many schools' systems public as possible, to facilitate sharing and collaboration.

lyndsysimon commented 11 years ago

That's what it meant to me, but I showed the question to my wife and she wasn't clear. I often ping things off her when I need a non-programmer's mindset :)

I don't think it changes anything on how it's implemented on the backend - a public attribute on the model would work just fine. On the UI, we should probably call the field "Visibility", "Security" or similar.

ehmatthes commented 11 years ago

I like that distinction between 'public' as an internal attribute, but something more clear to the general public as "visibility" or "private" in the interface.

It's quite interesting to work on a project that pulls heavily from the open source software development world, and just as much from the education world. I started speaking about this project to developers first, and that was fairly easy because I could use terms such as "forking" and "version control", and everyone knew what I was talking about. It's interesting to reframe the copy for a general audience.

lyndsysimon commented 11 years ago

Working with academics and researchers, I've seen much the same thing. While a lot of the users on the OSF are highly technical, many of them are specialized in their field, and there is great potential for process improvement when viewed in the light of how application development is done today.

I've also started paying closer attention to how others out there are doing similar things. For instance - Google Drive includes a "previous versions" functionality. It's on by default, but likely few of their users know about it - until they need it :)

It's all about lowering barriers IMO. You have to have excellent, easy-to-find documentation on these concepts, and they have to have sane defaults.

ehmatthes commented 11 years ago

This conversation is making me want to develop some of the standards I have been working on in public. It makes me think of a couple things:

I will make separate issues for these two items. (done)