MITC CHEF interface changes:

• in My Workspace —> Worksite Setup —> New Site : have the option of choosing Project website
  .
  Can we do this and how would we enroll students into project groups (something I'd want to do mid-term).
• I've just created a group called "CHEF first time use" which appears as a separate worksite.
  
  There doesn't seem to be any mark or feature to distinguish a course worksite from a project worksite and this may get confusing when students (and faculty) have several courses on CHEF. Ideally you'd want some sort of heirarchy here to some that "CHEF first time use" is a group part of "Pilot".
• remove navbar buttons - My Workspace —> Worksite Setup —> Select Site : Revise —> Add / Remove Features.
• change order of navigation bar buttons - how to do this.
  So, I'd like to have Announcements, then Schedule, Assignments, Discussion, Resources, Custom Web Page, Help. A Help button should also be located at the top right hand corner (I can supply some links to usability studies which show that users naturally expect a Help feature to be located in the top right hand corner of a web site) although I doubt whether this is easy to modify.
• Change position of iFrames on the Home page view navigation bar & iFrame locations
  I'd like the Recent Announcments, Discussion items, Chat Messages to appear on the left of the worksapce and Worksite Information on the right.
• Note discrepancy in text sizes within these iFrames view text sizes in adjacent iFrames .
  Text in the Worksite information iframe is set to 12 pixels while the adjacent Recent Announcements is at 10px as are all the other iframes I've looked at. A simple edit to the style sheet class/id should fix this.
• Change width and height of text input box. Why are these always too small (in almost every form based page the default box size is always too small - why?)? I maintain that students will be inhibited from typing much text into a smallish box.
  The current text input box for assignments is 510px x 117 px. This could be expanded within the bounding box to as much as 690 pixels wide and 200 or more pixels high view text entry box for assignments .
• Cause for concern.
  The minimum width of the browser window when viewing assignments is a little over 900 pixels view minimum width of browser window . This makes it impossible to view on a 800x600 screen without scrolling. Current usability recommendation is for 740 pixels page width to view on 800x600 screen.

A table with the course listings (click MORE) :

Midwest Instructional Technology Centre

Ann Arbor, Michigan

August 8th 2003

Summary of discussion points.

1. Roles in Pilot

   • Administrator - Manuel Rendon. In a full implementation there can be more than one administrator.
   • Worksite Manager :
     • In this pilot a "worksite" is equivalent to an Earlham Course (or group within a course ?).
     • A Worksite Manager will be the instructor of the course together with the EC support person (thus 2 people managing a single worksite).
     • Each "worksite" appears in the CHEF interface as a separate "tab" along the top. Worksite managers can subscribe themselves to different worksites (courses) (I think)
     • A student will only see the "worksite" (course) to which he/she has enrolled for.
     • Comment : what form do "groups" take. I think we agreed that a class group would be a separate worksite. In that case one would have a course worksite and a separate group worksite.
   • User = student. The ability of students to change the CHEF environment are determined by the worksite manager.

2. Documentation

   We need to suss out the U.M documentation available (URL from Hanna?)
   Local dox for students (monteze?). Share with others.

3. Timeline for implementation

   1. Last pre-public implementation of U.M latest CHEF build - 1 week
   2. Date window for student registration
   3. Finish pilot date

4. Expectations

   • Response time from CHEF system in daily use. Have we got any way of measuring time to update CHEF screen in response to increasing load?
   • System stability. We can expect the system to be reasonably stable but we can also expect glitches to occur which should be reported.
   • User support restricted to worktime hours. 9 - 6pm
   • Scheduled down time when system goes offline for backup and maintenance. 3pm to 6pm every Friday. This should be widely promulgated.
   • Support from MITC. See reporting procedures in next section.

5. Procedures

   • Account Creation
     Supply list of worksite managers to Manuel
     Students in course sign themselves up with their EC username and password. Window of opportunity for signing up before this closes (email dates to Manuel). Issue of joining groups.
   • Problem reports - site liasons (Mark and Diane) act as problem reporters and record problems in the MITC wiki (address)
   • Fatal Error reports - phone /email Manuel's pager. These are problems which have resulted in the whole system grinding to a halt.
   • Bugs / Glitches. Problems which do not prevent normal working. Issue report and possible workaround.
   • Feature requests. Aspects of the system that function as intended but could be enhanced.
   • Moans / Grizzles. Why doesn't this look like Blackboard, etc? Note and discard.

6. Assessment

   MITC requests a monthly (or thereabouts) progress report form from each worksite manager with following information:
   • How is CHEF being used - which tools are being used by students in class and for assignments.
   • Usability questions - frustration with CHEF way of doing things, difficulties with operations, positive features of the system.

7. Notes

   • Channel of communication with developers:
     EC support —> Manuel (MITC HQ) —> Hanna Reeves (UM Union) —> CHEF application developers.
   • MITC is one of 5 CHEF pilots - the others are NEES (Earthquakes), UCLA, Portland, ASHE
   • The CHEF application architecture has been described as "outstanding" and "robust" but there may be inconsistencies in the design of the user interface and navigation. Any inconsistencies in design or issues with the user interface we should feed back to Manuel.
   • Hanna Reeves mentioned that there may be a tool to analyse the CHEF logs. We should make further enquiries about this since the CHEF.log could provide us with some useful usage statistics.

The meeting is now on Friday 8th Aug at 9am with Hanna Reeves from the Michigan Union.

Questions and Issues

• Student usernames and passwords - entering and maintenance

  Manuel's current suggestion about entering student usernames:

  We should talk about entering student names. I checked with the CHEF development team and there is no way for users to change their own password. I think it's because U of M has a system that allows for a unified login for various systems. They'll probably be implementing it someday since a couple of the groups (I think there are only a couple) that are implementing it have asked about it.

  One possibility is that we allow students to create their own account. That way they would choose their password, username, name and email address. We could also let them join the groups for the first couple of days and then turn that off once everyone is in the proper group. Once I give you administrative access to the course worksite you can add people to the course. I'd have to provide you with a list of user accounts since this is only available to the admin user. These would have to be entered by hand.

  My response:

  I think that this would work - but it would have to be done in class.

   

• Evaluation / Assessment

  I'd like to obtain some usage statistics of CHEF (perhaps Apache logs?) to answer questions like:
  • What time of day do students commonly do things on CHEF such as use discussion group, chat, upload assignments, check announcements? (per course averaged over the semester)
  • What components of the CHEF system are the most heavily used by the teachers
  • Other assessment metrics which can be obtained from the system (to be discussed)

     

• Question of style

  I have recently taught a course about web design and so have some notions about "usability" .....

  
  

  Most of the CHEF interface has a 'clean' and intuitive look. However, However, I am not enamoured of the buttons at the bottom of this screenshot, namely, "Add attachments", "Post", "Save Draft", "Cancel". The light grey color indicates either that they are not usable in this session, or that they have already been clicked upon. I think that just changing the clour of the text from light grey to black would make a huge difference.

  I did take a look at the stylesheet (chef.css) but it's so long I couldn't quickly figure out where this style was set. I'd like to be able to experiment with some minor style changes to button colour / typeface / hover, etc if that's possible.

• Customize

  I'd like to be able to customize the user experience in some way. I note that a button entitled "Argentinian News" has been added and there's also a "Customize" button.

  Customized CHEF buttons

  Can we add this to our implementation? I'd like to add BBC News / Sport rather than the CNN rubbish :-)