Sharing tracks with annotations from private categories lead to incomplete tracks

[ebbertd]

I'm writing this issue to document the current state and start the discussion on how to improve this.

At the moment students can create tracks and share there and students can create their own categories but not share these. The reason is that we restricted the creation of public categories to instructors.

This leads to the following problem and use case which can not be realised with the OAT: Sometimes the creation of categories and using these can be a task given to students by instructors. Students then create these categories in the tab mine, so that only the person who created these can see these. They then continue to use these categories in a track. Later they make this track available to the instructor. However, because the categories are private the instructors can see the track, but that track is missing the annotations from the students categories.

A possible solution would be to enable students to share a set of categories with the instructors (similar to how it is done for tracks). This would also mean that instructors would need to be able to filer which categories from which students they wish to see.

[dagraf]

As other teachers are reporting the same issue I suggest I start the discussion answering Daniels post: I like Daniels solution with adding an option «shared with administrator» for all categories that are created in the tab "Mine". I would offer it in the "edit category" modal. But I think there is no need for a possibility to filter which categories from which student I want to see. Instead, when an admin selects a track from a student and when this student has a category "shared with administrator" a new tab appears in the category window named "Name, Surename" or "others".

We could also think of an option "shared with all others" or "public" for categories in the tab "mine". With this not only administrators but fellow students could see such shared categories of students.

Question: As these categories belong to someone other I think they should not be "clickable" for others. So they would be in a "read-only" mode. What do you think?

[ebbertd]

Thank you for your suggestions. About the option to share categories with all others, it used to be possible that all users create public categories. That resulted in lots of public categories which quickly became not usable. However, I do see the need to be able to also share categories belonging to a track.

To move forward we thus have to distinguish between public categories that were created by an administrator / instructor and public categories created by students that are shared along with a specific track.

Therefore I like your suggestion that when an admin selects a shared track the shared categories used in that track also become visible, but only read-only.