Development talk:PublicPrivate

Can't you do this with roles? I think you should be able to.--Tim Hunt 00:18, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Don't think so but we're open to ideas

A couple years back our programmer, Mike Franks, had a conversation with both Martin Langhoff, and Martin Dougiamas. Basically we had a need to make activities and resources either available to everyone, or private and only available to members of that course. Both Martin's mentioned that it can be done with Groups and Groupings, so we went based off that suggestion. The problem is, it is too complicated to setup for the average instructor, so we automated the process.

Every time a course is created when this feature is turned on, a group "Course Members" is created, and the grouping "Private Course Material" is created. All the members of that course automatically get dropped into the Course Members group. With that automation in place, all a professor needs to worry about now is clicking the little lock icon to control access to any resource or activity.

If you would like to see this in action I can set you up with an account on our TEST server.

How does PublicPrivate compare with OpenShare?

It woud be a pity to have two independent paths that lead to the same end. Both developments look like they could provide solutions for institutions who want to gradually open existing courses, in a cost-effective way that's also very easy for teaching staff to manage. An important step towards "OCW 2.0"?

OpenShare: http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/addons/openshare/