Group Choice

Introduction

This block has been developed originally for the teachers of the university Polytechnic of Montreal (as a summer internship). The needs that the teachers had is to let the students being able to form their groups, with groups already created by the teachers the standard way.

Social Student Group Formation

Since the students are the ones that form the groups, it means that there is a social interaction that has to be considered.

There are two ways to join a group:

1. A Student sends an invitation to a group's teamleader teamcreator.
2. A TeamCreator sends an invitation to a student to join its group.

There are some more few things that are important to know for the teamcreator:

• if the group is originally empty, the first student that try to send an invitation become the teamcreator.
• the teamCreator of a group is defined by the timestamp of the mdl_groups_members "timeadded" field.
  • If a teamCreator quits the group, the next student that has the min(timeadded timestamp) become the next teamCreator (or the group is empty).

Why There is a TeamCreator?

The reason why we added the concept of a teamleader is because we were at the problem where if a student has sent an invitation to a group's members:

• All the members should accept the student's invitation for him/her to join the group (which increase the complexity!)
• It is not fun for the students if they HAVE to login to send an invitation to a group in which they know they will be part.

  In fact this is the major reason why a teamcreator has been used has a main concept for the block. 
  Because how the groups are formed is normally someone in the group that write the names of the other students of the group and give the paper to the teacher for the group formation.

Use Cases

title	The teacher sets the block's preferences
Scenario	The system display the page "Preferences". The teacher sets the data he/she wants the block to have, then click "Save changes". The system checks if the input received is valid and save in the DB the new preferences of the block's instance for the course.
Alternative	1. The input is not valid: The page show a box indicating that the data has not been saved.

title	The teacher checks the course's groups and groupings
Scenario	The System shows the page "Group List". The Teacher can see the groups and groupings used for the course's. The Teacher can also see which student is alone and is not part of a group (todo: by groupings too).
Alternative	N/A

title	The teacher export the course's groups
Scenario	The System shows the page "Export Groups". The Teacher choose the data that the export file should contains, choose the format of the file and append the email address of the people that should receive the file. Then clicks on "Export". The System create the file with the input's data and sends it to the emails written.
Alternative	1. No email has been written: The System create the file with the input's data and force the download to the local machine. 2. Try to uncheck the student's Email option: The system show a message indicating that indicates that this data must be present in the file.

title	the student checks his/her groups
Scenario	row 1, cell 2
Alternative	row 2, cell 2

title	the student sends an invitation to a group
Scenario	row 1, cell 2
Alternative	row 2, cell 2

title	the teamcreator sends an invitation to a student
Scenario	row 1, cell 2
Alternative	row 2, cell 2

title	The student's quit one of its groups
Scenario	row 1, cell 2
Alternative	row 2, cell 2

title	Accept/Refuse an invitation
Scenario	row 1, cell 2
Alternative	row 2, cell 2

This page is under construction