Course instances and dedicated course lessons

[skippybosco]

Spotted the Twitter Post.. any specifics you can share on what the net effect of this change will be and a time frame to expect it?

[papagel]

Course instances and unique lessons is part of 3.6.1 (I have included them on the roadmap).
The need for this extension stems from a practical need from a major client but it also open new opportunities for everyone.

Imagine the scenario that you have a school with a physics course separated in 4 different classrooms. Each classroom has its own teacher and different students. Currently you need to create 4 different courses to achieve this effect. Furthermore, each lesson is currently always on "shared" mode. Which means that it does not belong to any course and changes that happens to a lesson are shared with all courses that include it.

These extensions come to remedy this situation. You can now create a course with 4 different instances and you can assign the same lessons to each one of them in "unique" mode. Different sets of students/professors can be assigned to each instance. "Unique" lessons are now linked to their course and can be modifying without altering the initial lesson. Furthermore, when someone completes a course-instance he directly completes the related course as well.

[skippybosco]

I saw "Added course instances functionality" in the latest SVN build (3.6.3)

You mention that "Unique" lessons can be modified without altering the initial lesson. How are those changes stored (ie. is a duplicate of the original lesson created?) Do changes in the initial lesson propagate to linked lessons? If so, how are conflicts managed?

Is this a step in the direction of Course level objects (ie. course level Tests, course level Glossaries, etc)

[papagel]

This is actually a step towards Course-centric eFront.

When you create a course you can decide if a lesson is in "shared" or "unique" mode.
The shared mode is the current eFront mode - no surprises here.
The unique mode is new and it works as follows:
- It creates a new "invisible" lesson and attach it to the course
- It copy the content from the initial lesson
- For efficiency reasons it "shares" the folder between the new and the old lesson. If this was not the case then you would witness enormous loss of storage from this process. However, since all "unique" lessons that derive from an initial lesson share the same files if someone deletes a file then everyone will have issues. Still, you can "happily" assign different users to the new lesson and change the order or the units-content. Just don't delete files