As a teacher, I'd like to be able to see what the student sees.
Once, I did get the administrator to add a "Joe Student" for me, so that I could log in as Joe, but it's a bit involved to constantly ask administration.
Could there be some way to simply click on a "student view" of a page?
When viewing a course, you can now click the three stacked dots in the top right and select "View course as student."
Hi John,
It would be helpful to know what areas specifically you would like to see from the student perspective. We designed the courses to look very similar to faculty and students, so that faculty can be confident of how information will appear to students. However, there are some sections, like the test creation interface, that students won't see. For most of those, we've built previews. Let me know which section you are thinking about and Ill be able to discuss it with our development team.
Thanks!
I'd like to see the grade report and the attendance/absent/tardy reports.
I'd like to see the Evaluation tab and whether it's there or not on a particular course. I know that we can see Evaluation availability on the course's info page, but it would be nice to see (with my own eyes!) that the Evaluation tab is indeed available for students on a given class. Thank you.
I'd like to see the assignments from the students' perspective -- when it says the format is a file, is there an upload link for the students to submit their work?
Thanks!
@Regina - Yes. When an assignment is a File type the student can upload a file.
I would also like to be able to see what students see in terms of evaluations. I need to check that the evals are indeed available and that they are the right ones. Thanks.
Sarah,
If it helps, what I have done is create a sample, "test student" enroll them temporarily in the course, login as the test student and then see what the other students see. I then take them out of the course. Hope that helps.
“Student View”: occasionally, students ask for help navigating certain features in Populi. Most frequently this has to do with the financial functionality of Populi. It is difficult for us to provide over-the-phone help since, even with academic administration privileges, we cannot see exactly what the student sees. While the example videos and tutorials on the Help site are useful, it would be really helpful to literally be on the same page as the student.
Having the teachers be able to have a student view is important, I think. When the teacher logs in, there are some differences on the assignment page, the lessons page, and the discussions page. Often, teachers want to show people (some people can't seem to figure it out on their own still by midterms) where and what to put things. As an example, one of my professors was trying to show people how to upload a file to an assignment in the assignments section and not in the discussion section, but she couldn't show what the student would see. Instead, she had to log out and another student had to log in to her account so the teacher could show the class. Since she was the student's academic advisor also, it wasn't a big deal that the teacher saw the information about her other classes, but the other students in the class should not have had the opportunity to see that information. It could simply be a toggle switch available only to instructors.
The student view is a must for our institution. There are too many cases where the administration has not known what the student can see or access. Asking the students to provide their personal passwords has not been an appropriate solution in resolving this. Adding a test student account is not acceptable either since it disrupts reporting and causes further confusion for the faculty and administration.
I would like to add to this request. My team was talking this morning how it would be helpful to easily switch to a student view when issues pop up, so we can see exactly what they see. We had an issue this past week where students couldn't see discussions, but we could. Easily switching views could help us problem solve much more quickly. I know "Desire 2 Learn" has a button that will allow a quick switch without having to constantly bother the registrar.
I agree. Moodle allows higher level users to "become" lower level users. This allows a faculty member to become a student to see what they see, or a Moodle administrator to become anyone in the system, so that they can troubleshoot problems easily. They can even take action on behalf of the other people, though it is logged that the admin is the one taking the action as the other person (a vital security and auditing function, IMHO).
We would love to see this as well. I need to create some tutorials for our students, as well as walk them through it in the classroom, and without creating a fake student there is no way to show them how to use Populi without displaying a real student's information (or my own.)
Our workaround thus far has been a sample student user (We call him "Sparky!") who we enrolled, randomly, in courses. We've shared this across the departments, but a switch on course/test/discussion/lesson/etc. views that allows faculty and staff to preview the "STUDENT" view would be great.
That one link Isaac posted isn't working.
@Mary - Sorry about that! That was posted six years ago so it was probably taken down for being way out of date. The best way to see what a student sees now is to make a pretend student that you can enroll in a course, test it out, and then delete from the course as needed.
It would be great to be able to log in as a "ghost" of the student and be able to navigate through everything they can see to help them work through their issues, including financials
It sounds like the best option here is that those with higher levels of access should be able to turn on the option to see what anyone lower in the system can see (i.e. faculty see what students see, etc).
I agree. This functionality would be very helpful. When designing a course, it is a pain to have to switch to another account 20 times per hour to understand how it will look.
Is there any progress on the creation of a Student View without having to create a dummy student? Thanks!
@Janet - That's not something that Populi currently offers, but we're aware that, as of this moment, at least 37 people would like us to add it. It's a pretty big project that, in order to be able to implement, involves refactoring a lot of the code for courses in Populi. We been working on that bit by bit for a couple years.
@Evan - I find logging in as a faculty in one browser (e.g. Chrome) while logging in as a test student in another (e.g. Safari) pretty handy.
Make that 38 people, need it to create a screencast to walk a student through navigating the interface... thank you for your consideration!
Make the 39.
41
For Registrar to also have the ability. I would love to be able to guide the students real time over the phone when helping them navigate, but I'm not sure what they can or cannot see. It diminishes their confidence in me.
Make it 42! And if you count all our staff who use Populi, that goes up to like 73! And if you weight the votes based on how often we'd use it, that would make it about 10,000 if you round up. ;)
Couldn't you just include one free student account with every Populi account? That way each user could do with that student what they want and need for their demonstration purposes. But they just wouldn't get charged for it.
For those of you that have added a fake student (we call ours sample student) how do you deal with the billing side of things? When sample student is enrolled in courses it creates a bill that our finance department then has to deal with. It also messes with our IPEDS automatic reports that are generated by populi.
Same request made here: https://support.populiweb.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000892613-Student-View-for-faculty-admin.
I think other iterations of this request are floating out there too.
Agreed, especially for the LMS in the Lessons and Quiz views.