Feature #21327
openAdding Campus-Specific Templates to the Commons
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Description
Hi All,
Several campuses have asked about creating custom templates for use by thier students and faculty. Some requests include:
- City College First Year Writing Program: several years ago the program asked about creating templates for students to use when creating their writing portfolios that they use across a series of two writing classes. I have not spoken to them about this in a while but I imagine if we open up this possibility on the Commons they would be interested.
- Hunter College Scholars: More recently Hunter college scholars programs have asked about creating a series of templates for student's creating portfolios in their various scholars programs. Students are building portfolios to collect their work across several classes.
Other campuses that may be interested include Brooklyn College Dietician Program, York Physician Assistant Program, both of which require students to create commons sites to create portfolios to collect course work for their progress through the program.
At the Commons team meeting on 10/18/24 we discussed the possibility of building these campus-specific templates into the site creation process.
Currently we have 4 templates available during site create: Default, Teaching, Conference, Academic Portfolio. I will call these the "Standard templates".
(A Note: The academic portfolio is meant for faculty but I think this has confused some users, particularly students, who select this template for their course work portfolios. I would suggest we change the name of this template and I will submit another ticket for this.)
To build in campus specific portfolios into the site creation process, we would need to consider how/when these template become visible and selectable during the creation process.
I would like to suggest that the campuses specific templates be "additive" meaning when a user selects their campus during the creation process, the templates then become visible below the "Standard Templates".
A few questions to consider:
- Is the "additive" approach for selecting campus-specific templates the best way to do this? What are other options?
- Will it be confusing or less effective if campus-specific templates appear below standard templates?
- How will we allow campuses to submit templates and what should the guidelines be for templates we accept?
- What other considerations am I missing?
I think campus faculty and staff would be excited about this. I am looking forward to discussing further.
Thanks!
Files
Updated by Boone Gorges 3 days ago
- File cac-site-layout.png cac-site-layout.png added
- File cbox-template-selector.gif cbox-template-selector.gif added
Thanks for starting the conversation, Laurie.
To spell out the UX challenge a bit more: We currently have a template selection mechanism that assumes that we'll only have a couple options to choose from. See cac-site-layout.png. This quickly becomes unwieldy when we add more templates. So the core idea is that we want an easier way for users to view and select their desired template.
Laurie, you've already spelled out the "additive" vs "subtractive" dichotomy. What "additive" means in this context is that when you start creating a site, you see only the most general layouts (say, the three we already offer); depending on certain actions you take, like the selection of a campus, you'll see more available items. Subtractive would be the opposite: You see all of the templates, and then you use some sort of tool to drill down and/or filter to the ones you want.
There's another, related interface dichotomy to consider: "implicit" vs "explicit" filtering. By "explicit" I would mean an interface where you specifically limit the available templates. See, for example, cbox-template-selector.gif. There's a category dropdown that users can use to filter the available options. The opposite of this would be "implicit" filtering, where the tool shows you only those templates that we've determined, by other means, that you probably want to see. So, for example, we might show the "City College First Year Writing Program" template only if (a) you are using a Student account, and (b) you've selected "City College" as the associated campus, and (c) you've selected "ePortfolio" or whatever for the Site Purpose. Implicit filters are nice because they reduce the need for user action, but they're problematic because it can be difficult for users to find exactly what they're looking for - there's no mechanism for browsing all available templates.
Dovetailing with these interface questions is the question of how the data is carved up. In the example I gave above, I said we could show a given template based on (a) a user's Role, (b) the Associated Campus of the site, and (c) the Site Purpose. These are just three options, but already you can see how this gets really complicated. Say there are 4 templates associated with CCNY, two of which are meant for Faculty and two of which are meant for Students. If you have explicit filter tools, what do they look like? Separate dropdowns? For Commons In A Box OpenLab (cbox-template-selector) we went with the generic "Category" mechanism, because it was a simple dropdown that could be used to capture all sorts of different possibilities.
Hopefully these are some helpful talking points for thinking about the possibilities.