Create Multiple Lessons At One Time?

Before I answer your question I want to explain this premise: In using education software there are probably many planning and scheduling methods. I want to focus on just these three.

1. Book Based: Teacher and students use a book based learning system. The teacher just uses online software to schedule the lessons and to give assignments. The students only use the website to check on times when they are to be in class. (classroom)
2. Combination Book and Online: Teacher uses a mixture of book based learning and some online lessons. The teacher may start off as fully book based and then gradually put more and more of her lessons online. In this case, besides checking into the website to see the class times and notices, they also do some of their lessons online.
3. Mostly Online: The teacher creates full lessons online. The teach may spend a lot of time on each lesson to get it just right. The teacher may only teach in one area of study or only teach one course (and consequently may have more time to devote to  lesson creation). In addition, when she makes out the lessons for each course she may use it with several groups (classrooms of students) at the same time each year. In this case it is very useful/important for her to have the ability to copy the whole course full of lessons for each group of students. The students may do a large part of the assignments online, while (perhaps) doing some of the lessons from book

Now, to answer your question:

"How would you imagin the creation of multiple lessons at one time?" by Axel

Your question could be understood two ways. You could be asking, "Why do you want to create multiple lessons at one time" OR you could be asking "How do you think that multiple lessons could be created in Drupal/Opigno at one time". I will start by answering the first question.

Why do I want to be able to create multiple Lessons at once?

I have used various types of lesson scheduling software. One of the previous ones we used was Homeschool Skedtrack. You can see screenshots of it here.

With Homeschool skedtrack you can enter one lesson at a time (something like Opigno does, only simpler):

Or you can enter the content for multiple lessons all at one time. One thing that I really liked about Homeschool Skedtrack was the "Edit Activities".

This window allows you to 10, 20, 50 or more blank lessons at the click of a button. This makes the entering of a basic group of lessons (such as book-based lessons) so much faster and easier because multiple lessons can be filled in without the time-consuming process of navigating to this page and to that page and then create a new lesson page etc.

Then after you enter all the lessons for each course, assign the students to the courses, the lessons in each for each student will all show up on the "Today's Activities" page. This allows the student to log into the website and see all the lessons that he needs to do on any given day.

I've been experimenting to see what is possible with Opigno. I've found the editable views module (see here for the video tutorial) I'm still in my initial testing have been able to partially create a single page where multiple lessons can be edited at one time..

It doesn't show all the lesson fields that I'd like to be able to edit yet. The only two fields that I've ben able to make editable at this point are the Title field and the "lesson type" field, as shown in the picture. However this gives me hope that what I want is possible.

Best Wishes,

Stephen

Now, to answer the second question that you might of meant:

"How do you think that multiple lessons could be created in Drupal/Opigno at one time?"

FIRST EXAMPLE

Here is the first example of adding lessons quickly: "Course Planner", which has a lot of useful functions that could be used as examples to benefit the development of Opigno.

Here is a 30 minute Drupal Couse Planner Tutorial. (Click on the picture below to watch the tutorial)

The whole video is well worth watching, but if you are short on time, I've created links to various points in the video.  

• Let's start at making courses,
• then follow that up with creating lessons
• Showing Course Calendar in use: 4:03
• Course Sections at 7 min
• Resource Lists at 10 Min
• Adding Another Section, and Insert missing lesson, at 15:26
• Adding Course Outline, that can be used in multiple courses: at 18:23
• Exporting the Course Calendar to other calendars: 22:30
• Searching and Filtering the Course: 25:30
• Browse Resources: 26:22
• Example of Course Planner in use: 29:45

You Can test out the Course Planner for yourself here: Course Planner on SimplyTestMe.com, click on the "Launch Sandbox" button.

Here where the Drupal Course Planner is in actual use: Kursplanering(beta)

I have put all this together hoping it will spur some ideas among the Opigno developers. Since the Course Planner is built upon Drupal and Opigno is built upong Drupal, maybe some of the parts could be used interchangeably? But I'm not a programmer and have no idea of what is possible.

Best Wishes,

Stephen

THE SECOND EXAMPLE

Now, to answer the second example of a possible solution to creating multiple lessons at one time. I found a Drupal module called Multiple Node Add that I tried out. From my initial testing it seems to duplicate the lessons very well. I was generally pretty happy with the way that it performed. However, the boxes are larger and clumsy. I would like to see the sizes of the reduced considerable.

Here is a screen shot of the Multiple Node Add Module in use. Just after clicking on the "Create Multiple Nodes" menu item this is how it looks. the top section of blue rectangles are choices of all the content types.

(Note: click on any of the larger pictures below to have the picture enlarged).

During the first test I choose to create 8 lesson nodes, and did not check any of the boxes by A "Fields to Manage",

and the is what duplicated lessons looked like.

Then I chose only to put a check box in one of the fields (Introduction)

And this is what the duplicated lessons looked like.

and for the last text I checked all four check boxes.

This is what the duplicated lesson box looks like.

The more "fields to manage" that are check, the larger and more awkward the whole duplicated lesson box becomes.

I would like to see all these big clumbsy boxes replaced by a simple table, similar to a spreadsheet. Something simple and small.

Is it possible to change the formatting, css, or whatever else on these boxes to make it smaller, as said above? That could make the Multiple Node Add module a workable solution.

In my testing I had use this module to try to create about 150 new lessons all at once. There was aparenty much going on (including the creation of 150 wysiwyg windows) that it crashed the web browser. It may have had better success if I had of turned of the wysiwyg edit windows. However, I have had no problems creating smaller numbers (10 to 20).

I will be testing this module some more and may end up using it. It is the best module to create multiple lessons or nodes that I have found at this time. Perhaps someone can figure out how to make the created boxes much smaller.

Best Wishes,

Stephen