Ideas for the future version of Social Learner (2.0?)

[Michael]

Some of these ideas have been mentioned before in other forums on the site but perhaps this topic could be used to collect ideas and allow other Social Learner users to post/vote for their ideas.

Wishlist:
Integrated Front-end Course Creation
– Inspiration – https://wisdmlabs.com/front-end-course-creation-for-learndash/
– Integration with H5P: https://h5p.org/ for front-end creation of interactive HTML5 content

Front-end Dashboard
– Students will have an overview of course progress, badges, assignments, leaderboard (perhaps allow Social Learner users to select which items they want on the Dashboard from WP Backend?)
– Teachers/Instructors/Group Leaders can view their commission, number of courses created, student progress, review student assignments
– Inspiration – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLx97Z0TyXs

Dedicated ‘Courses’ Page
– Instead of using LearnDash / Sensei shortcodes to create a Course Overview page it would be great to have a dedicated page with: Buttons to view ‘My Course’, ‘Create Course’ (tied to front-end course creation) and ‘All Courses’. If possible this page should replace the standard ‘Course’ page (see e.g. http://demo.buddyboss.com/social-learner-learndash/courses/)
– Similar in style to the current BuddyPress ‘Groups’ and ‘Members’ pages.

Notes Widget (possible included in plugin extension BuddyBoss Inbox?)
– Mentions: https://www.buddyboss.com/support-forums/topic/buddypress-note-taking/
– Inspiration: https://vimeo.com/96575721 – Go to (1:55)
– Could be tied to BuddyPress Docs or BuddyBoss Inbox where auto-save is actually working.

I hope this feedback is useful.

Best regards,
Michael

[Anonymous]

Hi @mln83, Appreciate your input on the above points.. I will discuss about it to our development team to include it in our further development.

Regards

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your feedback.
This is very helpful and right on time.

We’re currently in the planning phase of Social Learner 2.0.
After the issues we’ve had in the last few weeks with Social Learner, regarding the plugin updates, we’ve decided to put a huge focus on the product and come up with a much better and more feature rich Social Learner.

All ideas are welcome, and worth considering.
We have a huge list of features we’re looking at and we are working on creating all the requirements for the next Social Learner.
It will probably take some time until this is released, since we’re still in the planning phase, and there is a lot of things to design and develop, but it’s going to be great, and we’re super excited about it.

Thanks again for your input!

Best,
Tom Chedd.

[Michael]

Hi @pallavi, @tomchedd,

Thanks for your kind words.

I completely agree. The priority right now must be to get Social Learner a bit more stable and make sure the design issues will be fixed. Sooner – rather than later.

I will provide a bit more feedback here related to my previous 2.0 wishlist:

Front-end Dashboard
A clever way of implementing a Dashboard (from the code/technical point of view) would be to link the dashboard to BuddyPress Member Type: https://www.buddyboss.com/product/buddypress-member-types/

Why?

It will allow more flexibility in the longer run. I will come with a few user cases here:

Member: Student. Want’s to have a dashboard where he/she can see course progress, assignments, badges, community discussions.
Member: Instructor. Want’s to see how many courses he/she sold over the past week, month, year. The number of students enrolled, feedback/questions from Group Leaders or students.
Member: Group Leader. Want’s to see students progress, review assignments, quiz results.

Question: Why is a Group Leader different from Instructor?

Answer: Because an Instructor designs the courses. The Instructor may not want to review assignments from students because he sells the course to companies or schools. The company or school will assign a local Teacher (Group Leader) who will want to review the students progress.

Btw: Here is an example of a recent plugin that allows group enrolment:

Group Registration for LearnDash

So things are certainly moving in that direction.

Dedicated ‘Courses’ Page
Again from a technical / design point of view, it would be clever to replace the standard ‘Courses’ page:
http://demo.buddyboss.com/social-learner-learndash/courses/

with an improved version of:

http://demo.buddyboss.com/social-learner-learndash/all-courses/ (as explained above)

Why?

Reason 1: Because many Social Learner users are not coders. I often see the same question posted again and again. “How can I make the course page look like the one on the demo site?”. Now of course, for a developer, it’s pretty easy. You just insert a bit of shortcode on a WP page and tweak the CSS a bit to make it nice but for someone not familiar with code it can be like climbing Mount Everest.

Reason 2: Technical optimization. If done right, it could potentially solve some issues in the current Boss / SL code. For instance, as it is now when a user clicks on a course “Category” from a Course page he is referred back to “Course/Custom Post Type” with that Category. When the same user clicks on a course “Category” from a Group page he is referred back to “WordPress Standard Post Type”. I.e. referred away from courses pages. See video for clarification:

Reason 3: User Experience. When you finally realise how to set up the beautiful Course Overview page (http://demo.buddyboss.com/social-learner-learndash/all-courses/) it would be nice to return to something that looks like that page and not a standard WordPress Blog Layout page like the one shown in the video.

I have a few more ideas but I will keep those for Social Learner 3.0 🙂

I hope this clarified feedback is useful.

Best regards,
Michael

[Michael]

More feedback:

Front-end Course Creation
It would be great if the interface would be simple to use. Something similar to what you guys did with the User Blog plugin – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqAat5I4IKQ – it looks really great.

IMHO there are two things missing from the current User Blog interface which could make Front End Publishing more powerful:

1) The Add Media button from Visual Editor. In my case, I have added some very nice plugins to extend what can be done from the Visual Editor in both WP backend and WP frontend:

Example: https://wordpress.org/plugins/pixabay-images/screenshots/

Some of the built-in WP features from Add Media like a simple gallery is also useful to have.

2) Columns. Yes, columns. I personally use: http://codecanyon.net/item/visual-columns-for-wordpress/6505510 to better organise content.
This could be used for inspiration as well: http://aesopstoryengine.com/ – not sure how well integrated their columns “feature” is, though.

3) Align left/center/right/full width. Would be nice to be able to control layout this way. Can be done in Visual Editor as it is now.

Best regards,
Michael

[Anonymous]

@mln83, Thanks for your input

[Ammo]

@tomchedd @michael I believe I said it before in another topic, but moving forward I would like to see a sustained emphasis on stability, accessibility, performance and semantics, before and after introducing any new features. This would include better handling of concatenating external resources and the loading of these resources, the hierarchy/cascading of the styling implemented, so the user isn’t having to constantly apply “!important” to their CSS attribute values in order for them to take affect, and ensuring empty HTML tags are not being injected into the DOM.

Also, and I think the BuddyBoss team is doing a great job heading in this direction, but I think regardless of what new features are introduced, they should be implemented in a way that doesn’t have negative implications on the theme if they are not being used.

Thank you!

[BusinessPapers]

I think regardless of what new features are introduced, they should be implemented in a way that doesn’t have negative implications on the theme if they are not being used.

I second this. Buddypress already has a lot of bells and whistles when compared to running Sensei by itself. I want to rollout these features gradually to my users one-at-a-time. While the recent Boss update does make it easier, previous versions of Social Learner would break if certain Buddypress components were turned off – which defeats the purpose of modular components.

We already have plenty of features. I can wait for new ones. Focus on the code.

[Michael]

Just to make one thing clear, code quality is and must be the highest priority at all times.

The priority right now must be to get Social Learner a bit more stable and make sure the design issues will be fixed. Sooner – rather than later.

Quote: @mln83

Focus on code quality first and features second. If you read my previous posts carefully, you will also notice that I mention that the needs of users may be different. This topic was meant to look beyond the current code crisis and improve on what SL already is. In any case, I would recommend a modular approach where BB developers utilize WordPress methodology including widgets, plugins and perhaps extend on the Boss backend panel to allow users to better personalize (specialize?) the Social Learner theme to suit specific needs. I think that BB developers are already moving towards this approach.

Current modular examples:
plugins: BP Member Types, BP Auto Group Join, BB Inbox.
Boss panel: Header, Layout, Custom codes,
widgets: Course Participants, Course Teacher, Course Progress etc.).

So keep up the good job guys! We know that Social Learner is a complex theme that is built on top of several dependencies (some of which open source) and users expect high quality from an expensive theme. So it’s a difficult balance but I think the approach with Code Quality first, BB modularity second is the way to go to satisfy all customers 🙂

Best regards,
Michael

[Michael]

My Courses / My Quizzes Widget (Could also be used on a Front-end Dashboard)
I am currently using the LearnDash Course Information widget to show “My Courses & Quiz results” to logged-in users in the sidebar. Unfortunately, there are no options to configure the widget. This means that the sidebar list becomes “overflowed” with information:

In any case, it may be more ideal to have two widgets:

“BuddyBoss – My Courses Widget” – Would be great with a backend setting to limit the number of courses shown in the sidebar.

“BuddyBoss – My Quizzes Widget” – Again similar as above. Only show the latest X number of results.

Best regards,
Michael

[Michael]

Drip feed content -> Events Manager
Mentioned before on the forum but I just want to add that it would be great to see this integration. It would mean that Events Calendar could be more useful for Users on the front-end. I believe both LearnDash and Sensei is capable of drip feeding content:

Drip-Feed (Schedule) Your Lessons!

Sensei Content Drip

Best regards,
Michael

[Michael]

Not related to Social Learner per se but I agree with @jeffghost that the Boss registration page could need a redesign to make it a bit more modern and increase user conversion (https://www.buddyboss.com/support-forums/topic/how-to-make-registration-page-look-better/#post-62715).

Here is some inspiration: http://userproplugin.com/userpro/#registration/

Best regards,
Michael

[BusinessPapers]

Since we’re pitching ideas, I’d like to suggest a change to the lesson page layout.

Currently, the lesson sidebar runs full-height, from top to bottom on the page. This is fine, except that it reduces the size of the video player substantially (See “Current Layout” attachment below).

Since video is often the focus of online lessons, it seems to me that the space allotted for it should be larger. What if the video block was a single full-width column, and the sidebar and lesson text shared two columns below it? (See “Proposed Layout attachment below). This would allow for the same sidebar content without compromising the size of the video player.

I’d love to see something like this.

[BusinessPapers]

I bring this up because I recently transitioned to Social Learner from another theme that featured full-width video on lesson pages, and some of my students have already started complaining about the now smaller video size. I want to use the course progress widget in the sidebar because it’s useful, but not at the expense of large-format lesson videos.

[Michael]

What if the video block was a single full-width column, and the sidebar and lesson text shared two columns below it?

It’s a good idea. At least put it in the WP backend Boss Panel as an option for Social Learner?

I have another suggestion today. I have noticed that when I or other Course Authors are creating a course and testing that course – The course progress also show up in the Group Home activity:

View post on imgur.com

It would be great if this test information could be filtered out from the group activity? Perhaps it would be possible to filter out Course Group Activity stream from the Course Group Admin??

Best regards,
Michael