[p2pu-dev] Making applications public

[Stian Håklev]

This is quite interesting - I remember us discussing this in Toronto, and
Zuzel coming up with the ingenious system of accepting applications. We
decided to only make the accepted applications public, and to only make them
public to accepted members, in case of sign up tasks that could be copied
(ie download this textbook and solve the first assignment).

Fast forward to the CSCL Intro course which I am organizing. Right now I
have a lot of followers, but not that many participants (which is fine, we
already have a good group of people, but I'd like a few more). We have a few
participants who didn't supply much info, so I replied to their post and
asked them to provide more (and I love how easy the system is , compared to
what we had at the old site!!)... and we had some that were really great.
Originally I was planning to wait until the end of sign up period to review
applications and let people in fair and square. But then I was thinking, I
don't think I'll get a huge amount of qualified applicants anyway, and it
might be nice to have the accepted people's applications show up on the
application page, to "model" good answers, and create a bit of buzz around
applying to participate, rather than just "following"...

So I accepted four people, and then went to look at the page from a
not-logged in browser... Ah, cannot see anything. Because of course you have
to be accepted in the class to see it. Which means that these applications
cannot serve as "models" to others coming to apply...

So I didn't want to file this as a bug report, because I am not sure we want
to change it - I could see reasons for doing it this way, but I wanted to
share this experience with you. It will be interesting to see how other
courses use the application functionality, and whether they like it as it
is, or would like anything changed.

Stian

-- 
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.p2pu.org/pipermail/p2pu-dev/attachments/20110419/062f61a6/attachment.html>