[LON-CAPA-users] assigning students to slots

Stuart Raeburn raeburn at msu.edu
Sun Feb 10 18:47:54 EST 2013


Hi,

> I want to break my class into two halves based on when the work on an
> computer lab project. I want the two halves of the class to have different
> due dates based on the slots.

Given that your course has a single section, I would create two  
groups, and then set different due dates for the particular  
assignment, based on the group.

1. As Course Coordinator click "Groups" in the inline menu.
2. Click the "Create a new group" link
3. For item 1: "Group name, title and available collaborative tools"  
enter a group name (Letters, numbers and underscore only) and a Group  
Title. If the sole purpose of the group is to allow parameter setting,  
you can leave the checkboxes for all the group collaborative tools  
unchecked.
4. For item 2: "Default start and end dates for group access" set  
appropriate dates when the group should be active.
5. For item 3: "Build a list of users for selection of group members"  
select: "Currently has access", "Student", "001" an click "Next".
6. For item 5: "Group membership" check which students in section 001  
should belong to this particular group
7. For items 7 and 8 you will likely not want to enable automatic  
group membership changes based on roster changes
8. Click "Create group"

Repeat steps 1 through 8 for your second group.

Now when setting parameters for a particular assignment, via "Modify  
parameter settings for this resource" from the "Functions" bar you  
will select a particular group from the "Group:" select box in the  
"Additional Display Specification (optional)" box at the top of the  
page. Click "Additional Display Specification (optional)" and then an  
additional set of columns will be displayed in the large (colorful)  
table, with the title "in Group <groupname>", immediately to the left  
of the "Parameter in Effect" column.

Groups are likely to better suited than slots to your particular use case.

Anyway, as regards slots there are two types -- student-schedulable,  
or instructor-assigned.

A step-by-step tutorial on how to use a "sign-up" problem in a course  
to allow students to sign-up for a particular project using slots (in  
LON-CAPA 2.8) is available here:

http://help.loncapa.org/faculty/signup-tutorial/2.8/

Since 2.8 there have been significant improvements in the way  
information about their current reservations (i.e., slots) is shown to  
students.

Over the years there have been a number posts made to the users  
mailing list in the past regarding the use of slots, e.g.,

http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2010-August/003661.html
http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2009-April/003469.html
http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2012-May/004001.html
http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2007-May/002635.html

> I can't understand how to assign one resource to two different slots?

To assign multiple "instructor-assigned" slots to a particular  
resource you would set the value of the "Slots of availability  
(available)" parameter for the particular resource with a  : separated  
list of slot names (where each slot name is the "Name" assigned to  
each slot on the first page of the slot creation screens.  You would  
also need to have set the "Use slot based access controls  (useslots)"  
parameter for the particular resource.


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

Quoting Carl Lira <lira at egr.msu.edu>:

> I am struggling to assign student to slots. Has anyone created a screencast
> about this? Or can you guide me by text words? I want to preassign students.
> I  can create the slots, but there are no students in them. I never get a
> page to add students. I can display the slots, but I can't see how to add
> students.
>
>
>
> I also tried to understand the documentation to create slots by uploading a
> csv file, but the procedure is not clear for the format of the file. Is
> there supposed to be one slot per line? Or one student per line with the
> other columns duplicating the slot information? According to the docs the
> usernames are supposed to be comma separated which would indicate one line
> per slot, but in a csv file, that would not make sense because each would be
> interpreted as a separate field.
>
>
>
> I want to break my class into two halves based on when the work on an
> computer lab project. I want the two halves of the class to have different
> due dates based on the slots. I may have some follow-up questions after I
> get the slots created. I can't understand how to assign one resource to two
> different slots? Do I make two copies of the resource and then assign one
> copy to each slot? Or do I indicate the relationship starting from the slots
> and then selecting a single copy of the resource for each slot?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Carl Lira
>
> Michigan State



More information about the LON-CAPA-users mailing list