Task sorting and grouping

[Basialo]

Hi! I'm a student at the moment studying a course that uses FormatIf, COMP3121.

I think the experience of using FormatIf would be way better if tasks could be sorted and grouped according to category, status, and topic. One of the biggest criticisms the course seems to get from students (other than confusing due dates) is the tasks feeling very overwhelming - I think the biggest contributor to this is the massive list of tasks in the taskbar, not necessarily the actual number of tasks required.

If tasks could be grouped according to topic (module in 3121), then student could look at only tasks relevant to a given week.
If tasks could be filtered according to status, students could ignore tasks that don't require action from them.
If tasks could be grouped and hidden by grade, things could feel much less overwhelming.

I think the ability to break down the list into subgroups is a critical and fairly straightforward thing to implement on the frontend?
I'd be interested to hear any context about why this hasn't been implemented already, I just figure a user's experience might be valuable.

[jakerenzella]

Hey! Thanks for the great feedback.

From my understanding, 3121 has more tasks than the average Formatif course due to its design which may have spurred this feedback in particular. I haven't really heard much from others in this regard.

The task inbox was modelled around the idea of an email inbox. You see the list of upcoming tasks and work your way through them.

The inbox is already filtered around task grade, so a Pass student won't see Credit tasks or higher.

Hidden future tasks goes against one of the ethos of Formatif which is that the student is in control and knows how much work is coming, and can get started at any time.

Grouping tasks by week or having sub tasks is possible, but would need to be thought through and it's not clear many other units or universities which use Formatif would benefit.

If others are reading this please let me know!

[lucassutherland]

I agree that it would be great to have ways to sort it. I'm also doing 3121 and think that it's really unintuitive to look through the big list. For example, if I'm usually a credit level student but want to try a particular HD task, then it expands all of them with heaps of deadline warnings and is visually frustrating.

Maybe it just isn't the best use case for 3121? For a course that has so many tasks in different categories, it's really surprising that it's not able to be grouped.

To add to what @Basialo was saying, if the student was able to manually hide and unhide courses, then it could mitigate the issue while still giving them the control.

A way to keep it consistent and flexible for the different courses that use it could be a tag system? i.e. the admins could optionally associate tags with a task like week3 greedy HD and then students could filter by one or more of them.

In general though I think it's super cool that members of our CSE faculty are developing software for our courses to use, thanks Jake 😄