Editing the Lessons Page

Students access all quizzes and course material through the Lessons Page. A course director arranges the Lessons Page as described here. Editing the page is relatively simple, but not (yet) elegant.

Warning: After saving changes to the Lessons Page, be sure to wait for the Lessons Page Updated page to fully reload, to ensure correct updating. Also, you are advised to scroll down the page to check for any messages concerning your entries. Error messages are incomplete, however, so be sure to view the Lessons Page in order to confirm that all information displays as intended.

Some possible problems you may observe:

When you set duedates for the semester you may note that the times are all correct up until the daylight savings vs. standard time changeover. The times after the changeover are "off" by 2 hours. E.g. if all your assignments are set to be due at midnight, then after the daylight savings change they appear due at 9:59 p.m. You have two (albeit non-ideal) options: let the times "appear" strange until the time change occurs, or set the times 2 hours off to start with and then go back and modify them during the term. (This problem relates to the way UNIX machines keep track of time.)
If you list the same quiz twice on the Lessons Page, then Mallard will use the first duedate - and ignore the second. (A message will appear on the Updated Lessons Page alerting you to this problem.)
If you attempt to make an unfinalized quiz available to the students, it will be shown as under construction.

Lessons Page Tags

The following pseudo-HTML tags are used to create the Lessons Page: group, lesson, quiz, and material. The Lessons Page consists of lessons and groups of lessons. Groups may even contain other groups, but a lesson consists solely of quizzes and course material.

Note: It is no longer required that quizzes and course material be placed within lessons. However, it may generally be advisable to do so in order to ensure expected "current lesson" behavior.

Group
A lesson group is a "book" of lessons and appears on the Lessons Page with a book icon. You may also nest groups within groups. When a book is closed, no lessons and/or groups within that group are shown. When a book is open, the lessons and/or groups within it are displayed. Click on a closed book to open it; click on an open book to close it.

Closed book: no lessons or groups within this group are displayed.
Open Book: lessons or groups within this group are displayed.

To place a lesson group on the Lessons Page, use the group tag and place lessons inside. The group tag creates a "book" of lessons.

<group title='Title of Lesson Group' 
       status='available|construction|invisible'
       duedate='mm/dd/yy h:m'>
  Lesson tags for lessons in group
</group>

The following parameters are specified inside the group tag:

title - The title will be displayed next to the group icon. Although not technically required, you will probably always want some title to appear.
status - Status can be set to available, construction, or invisible, as explained below.
duedate - Typically, no duedate will be specified here, because the duedate for the group is calculated from the duedates of the lessons it contains. Thus, a duedate, if specified here, will be displayed if and only if the lessons contained within the group have no duedate.

Most often you will use only the title and status parameters.

A partial example is given below (a more complete example is given later). There is a group called "My First Lesson Group" which contains lessons, a group called "A Nested Group: Test", and more lessons. My First Lesson Group has no status specified and hence is available to students. It has no specific duedate but will inherit a duedate from the lessons and groups within it. The (sub)group entitled "A Nested Group" is invisible and has a duedate of 7/28/97 at 2:30 p.m. There are lessons contained within it. (Note: no lessons were specifically shown in this partial example.)

<group title='My First Lesson Group'>
Lesson tags for lessons in group
    <group title='A Nested Group: Test'
           status='invisible'
           duedate='7/28/97 14:30'>
    Lesson tags for lessons in nested group
    </group>
Lesson tags for lessons in group
</group>

Lesson
The lesson tag is used to create an individual lesson on the Lessons Page.

<lesson title='Title of Lesson'
        status='available|construction|invisible'
        duedate='mm/dd/yy h:m'>
  Course material and quiz tags
</lesson>

The following parameters are specified inside the lesson tag:

title - The title will be displayed next to the lesson icon. Although not technically required, you will probably always want some title to appear.
status - Status can be set to invisible, construction, or available, as explained below.
duedate - Typically, no duedate will be specified here, because the duedate is calculated from the duedates inside the lesson. contains. The duedate specified here will be displayed if and only if the quizzes and course material within the lesson have no duedates.

Most often you will use only the title and status parameters.

Quiz
A quiz is placed on the Lessons Page by use of the quiz tag.

<quiz title='Title of Quiz'
      src=quiz_id
      status=available|construction|invisible
      duedate='mm/dd/yy h:m'>

The following parameters are specified inside the quiz tag:

title - Typically, the title of the quiz itself will be displayed and you will not want to specify a title here.
src (required) - The src (source) tag is required and gives the quiz ID of the Mallard quiz to be displayed. For reference, a list of available (i.e. already created) quizzes is given at the top of the Lessons Page.
status - Status can be set to invisible, construction, or available, as explained below.
duedate (required) - You must specify a date. If no time is specified, 0:00 is assumed (which means the very start of the day).

Most often you will use only the src, status, and duedate parameters.

Course Material
Course material is placed on the Lessons Page by use of the material tag.

<material type=material_type
          title='Title of Course Material'
          src=material_id
          status=available|construction|invisible
          duedate='mm/dd/yy h:m'>

title (required) - Specify here the title of the course material as you want it to appear on the Lessons Page. (If no title is given, the (ugly) material_id (the filename) appears.
src (required) - The src (source) tag is required and gives the quiz ID of the Mallard quiz to be displayed.
type - The type parameter is used to specify how the course material should be displayed. This is configurable for each course through your Mallard administrator. For instance, course types available to you might be lecture (type=lect), tutorial (type=tut), exercises (type=exercise), etc. Associated with each type is a heading title, color, and icon. All Mallard courses have a type called "ext" which allows you to make an "external" reference: in this case, the src parameter is a URL to which you want to link.
status - Status can be set to available, construction, or invisible, as explained below.
duedate - Duedate is optional.

Most often you will likely use the title, src, type, status, and maybe duedate parameters.

Status and Duedate

Each group, lesson, quiz, and material has an associated status and duedate.

Status
A course director can choose to make any group, lesson, quiz, or course material available, under construction, or invisible. The status is indicated by an icon. If not specified, the (default) status is available. The status codes are:

status = available When a lesson (or quiz, etc.) is available, students and others can access it freely. No icon is displayed.
status = construction An "under construction" icon is displayed, and this icon is seen by all. Hence, even students see that the item (lesson, quiz, etc.) exists, but only non-students can access the item itself. Construction status is useful when a lesson is "almost" ready (so students can see that it will be coming soon) or to prevent students from accessing a quiz while a correction is being made.
status=invisible A ghost icon is seen by developers and course directors. Students and instructors cannot even see that the item (lesson, quiz, etc.) exists. Invisible is convenient when arranging the Lessons Page or as a way to display future or possible lessons to other staff members.

Note: if an attempt is made to make an unfinalized quiz available to students, Mallard will change its status to put it under construction.

Duedate
The duedate is specified by giving the date (mm/dd/yy) and also the time (h:m). The time is given as 24-hour time: e.g., 16:43 is displayed on the Lessons Page as 4:43 pm. If a duedate specifies a day but no time, 0:00 is assumed (the very beginning of the day). The time may also be specified as "noon" or "midnight".

Duedates are required for quizzes but optional for course material. A lesson duedate is automatically calculated from the duedates of the quizzes and course material it contains; if there are no duedates within a lesson, then a user-specified lesson duedate can be displayed. Similarly, a group duedate is automatically calculated from the duedates of the lessons inside it. If and only if the lessons have no duedates, then a specified group duedate will be displayed.

New feature: If no duedates are specified, the current lesson will be considered to be the next uncompleted lesson on the page. This is useful for independent or distance education courses where there are no fixed duedates.

Example Lesson File

The following is a sample lesson file and the lesson page it produces. The duedates and completion checkmarks will vary depending on the state of the quizzes.

<lesson title='Introduction to Mallard' status=available>
  <material type=lecture src=intro title='An Introduction to Mallard'
            status=available>
  <quiz src=Mallard_intro duedate='8/30/98 Midnight' status=available>
</lesson>

<group title='This is my first group!' status=available>
  <lesson title='Lesson #1: Binary Numbers and Codes' status=available>
    <material type=lecture src=Binary status=available>
    <quiz src=Bin_Arith duedate='8/31/98 22:00' status=available>
  </lesson>
  <lesson title='Lesson #2: Boolean Algebra' status=construction>
    <quiz src=Bool_Id duedate='9/15/98 Midnight' status=available>
    <quiz src=Bool_Word duedate='9/16/98 14:30' status=available>
  </lesson>
  <lesson title='Lesson #3: Karnaugh Maps' status=invisible>
    <quiz src=Kmap_Min_I duedate='10/1/98 8:00'>
    <quiz duedate='10/1/98 8:00' src=Kmap_Min_II>
  </lesson>
</group>
<lesson title='Another Lesson' status='construction'>
  <material type=lecture src=first_summary title='Review for Exam'>
  <quiz duedate='10/15/98 noon' src=Exam1A>
</lesson>

Introduction to Mallard   8/30/98 Midnight
This is my first group!

Lesson #1: Binary Numbers and Codes   8/31/98 10:00 pm
Lesson #2: Boolean Algebra   9/15/98 Midnight
Lesson #3: Karnaugh Maps   10/1/98 8:00 am

Another Lesson   10/15/98 Noon

Comments? Questions? General harassment? Mail it to maiko@wocket.csl.uiuc.edu