TEAMMATES
Copy students from existing students table to new students table
Feature Proposal
Description of feature/enhancement
Adding a feature copy students in the course enroll page that would allows instructors to easily import existing students table into new students table for easier mass edits.
Justification
For instructors who want to batch edit many students, they would have to copy and paste the whole sheet from existing students manually. The slightly clunky cell selection in the sheet would make it sometimes hard to select all students, especially if there are many students. Therefore, I would suggest the addition of a button to auto-import existing students into the new students sheet below. This would be a QOL change and also helps when instructors want to mass-edit students.
Thanks for suggesting this @NeoHW Personally, I'm not fully convinced that this feature is worth the cost of maintenance. While it is can be useful at times, I think the cost/benefit gain is borderline. Select-copy-paste is a simple manual operation that everyone is familiar with, and it also gives the user the flexibility to select which rows/columns to select. Other opinions welcome. In the meantime, let's put this on hold, until we've decided one way or other. The PR you sent can be counted as a contribution nevertheless.
Hi. I am a student from Australian National University working on a group assignment to select and contribute to the OSS project, can I have a try to this issue though I noticed it may not so valuable, but I think this is a chance to get familiar with the project without disturbing others.
Thank you for the feature suggestion @NeoHW!
Personally, I agree with @damithc. Beyond the extra maintenance cost, I think there is an added complexity in the interface from the user perspective. Although I'm not a target user, I think that the "copy" button would benefit only a small percentage of use cases. However, the extra button would be displayed for all users visiting this page, potentially causing confusion from the added complexity.
@DhiraPT @peasantbird @InfinityTwo @mingyang143 @BunnyHoppp Would like your opinion on this! since we do have 2 PRs pending for this issue
I think my opinion is that if this is a feature that is going to be implemented, it should be either
(a) a button to "Override all students with existing" or something along those lines. The reason is because in theory, the logic should not need to touch on the format of the table and so any future changes are unlikely to affect the feature.
(b) It can also be a button to "Append existing students to the table" or something along those lines. This is in case the user already entered data into the new sheets but do not want to override it. In theory, I don't think it will need to know the table format as well so it should not break.
Otherwise, I don't think there is much of a use case implementing as others have said, the benefits are not so great. If they cannot use Ctrl/Cmd + A to select all (I have not tested it so I can't say if it works), I think that could be a better feature to implement as that is, in my opinion, as efficient as it needs to be for most users.
Thanks for your suggestion @NeoHW.
Personally, I agree with @jasonqiu212 that there won’t be many use cases for auto-importing existing students as new students. I also agree with @damithc that the cost/benefit gain is borderline.
@InfinityTwo @mingyang143 Thank you for your inputs! The spreadsheet does support ctrl/cmd + a to select all
@NeoHW After careful deliberation, we decided that this issue is not suitable to be worked on, because of the marginal benefits with added cost.
We do appreciate this feature proposal and your PR, and sincerely welcome more suggestions to the project! :)