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Assignments locked on the assignment tab leads to confusion

Iris Shields

September 13, 2024 23:31

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You have decided to lock assignments, even when going to them directly via the assignment tab, as long as a student hasn't gone through all the lessons in the lesson tab. This is extremely confusing as it wasn't clear to me I had to unlock the lessons first over in the lesson tab. I kept going to the assignment via the assignment tab (because that really makes most sense to me when I want to submit an assignment) and there was no submit option. This led me to believe I didn't have to submit anything and led to a late submission after the teacher told me I hadn't submitted anything. This is a bad UX.

Please either leave the assignments on the assignment tab unlocked OR make it much more clear that they are locked due to the fact that the lessons haven't been viewed yet.

The teacher also didn't know what was going on when I told her I could not submit anything. And I was stuck, I couldn't submit until a week later I accidentally opened the lessons on the lesson tab up, and noticed FINALLY I was able to submit also on the assignment tab.

When I talked to my school, they don't even want these lessons and assignments locked at all. And the teacher didn't know it was locked nor that this is a setting she can change. This all needs to be much more clear.

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4 comments

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  Adam Sentz September 17, 2024 21:11

  Iris Shields - If you'd like to submit feedback to your instructor, that you'd prefer to be able to access assignments directly from the Assignments tab instead of having to reach the specified part of a lesson, you'll need to contact your instructor. It's up to them whether or not it's set up that way.

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  Iris Shields September 17, 2024 22:35

  I understand, but when I contact these teachers they don't even know this is possible and how to do this, hence they don't change this. So still a Populi UX problem...

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  Adam Sentz September 17, 2024 23:40

  Iris Shields - This is the entire form for adding an assignment to a lesson (which is optional). When instructors add an assignment to a lesson they can set the Availability to "Assignment dates and available in lesson" or "Assignment dates only."

  If they do not wish access to an assignment to be restricted by whether or not it is available in the lesson they simply need to choose "Assignment dates only" instead of "Assignment dates and available in lesson"

  This seems like a pretty clear and unambiguous interface to me, but if you have an ideas about how we could improve it we'd love to hear them.

  

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  Iris Shields September 18, 2024 00:14

  It might seem clear to you, developers, product managers etc but that's because of tech savviness. A lot of teachers aren't this tech savvy.
  As for your question regarding what would be better: of course I am not a teacher so I can only go by this screenshot. Personally I do not find the wording "available in lesson" as a setting to availability very clear. The yellow message I encountered on the locked assignment also tells a student that the assignment is available in the lesson. I did not understand that yellow message either; it was still not clear to me that this meant I had to go through all the lessons first to unlock them one by one, in order to also unlock the assignment. Even having worked as UX designer for a couple decades...

  So this setting on the screenshot you provided does not really make it clear to me that the assignment is locked when the lessons are locked. Especially when teachers don't even know the assignments are locked, or can be locked/unlocked by them (my teachers told me they didn't), they probably have no clue what this means either.
  Since this setting relies completely on locked/unlocked lessons, I suggest making this more clear in these settings. I think a more clear availability setting would be "assignment date and unlocked lesson" , or something in that direction at least.
  
  All of this said, I think this whole process should be UX tested with actual users to see if the whole locking/unlocking and assignment availability with this current wording, or my suggested wording, is even understandable for them.