Features/Suggestions to the Cospaces Team

General
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I am currently in the process of learning the CoSpaces platform and in the process of me learning and setting up my class for my students I came upon a few problems/maybe just not implemented features. To preface my long topic, please do not take any offense with anything I say and I love the platform and what you guys have built, I just wish these features could be implemented and I’d love to personally give feedback and work with the team to test and whatnot.

  • I noticed that the process of creating assignments is extremely limited. There is no way to include more than one CoSpace inside one assignment, let’s say that I want to add a few difficulties to a specific assignment I am unable to do that, I have to create another assignment and set that difficulty up in another assignment, create another CoSpace, etc. In addition, if I’m using the feature to create collaborative assignments using the “group of students” option when creating an assignment I would have to manually move each student from one lesson to another. This however is just a workaround instead of it being natively available.
  • This was mentioned a few times, but sorting. There is no sorting of the assignments within my teacher dashboard of assignments and as some people noted, the same thing exists for students. Students have to manually click and select the sorting which although takes a few minutes, due to the lack of having the hide/un-hide lessons function, the whole curriculum is basically there for the student.
  • Teacher dashboard is extremely limited. For example, let’s say I have a prepared curriculum of approximately 30 lessons, there is no way to hide the lessons temporarily from my students and then just unhide them when we are ready to use that lesson. The only way right now to do that is to use the lock feature. Now that feature works great, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is a workaround, but in terms of letting a student focus on one specific thing and helping them avoid too many things on the screen at once would be great. A counterargument would be to just open the assignments for the students, but as a senior teacher who has to prepare the course and also administrate the processes for my other co-workers and students I think it becomes a waste of time and could be easily solved by letting me hide and un-hide lessons from the students. In addition, creating the CoSpaces in my account and then using them as assignments is also a workaround, but again, there is no native feature for me to do this all in one place, I have to jump from one place to another.
  • A lack of a general CoSpaces documentation for teachers. I successfully completed the CoSpaces Edu Course and have looked over every single reference guide provided, including the shortcuts, CoBlocks, and all other documents provided. Beyond the YouTube videos that I have watched from the CoSpaces official YouTube and some stuff I figured out myself, there is no available PDF file or guidebook that exists to walk a teacher through the steps to create a class and whatnot. I would be more than happy to help out with that and even draft a tutorial for the team, but that is entirely up to you all.

For some context: I have a teacher account, and a testing student account that I use. I am also planning to obtain a third account to test the co-teacher features.

There are probably some more things that deal with administration and management of co-teachers and whatnot, but these are my thoughts so far. Thank you for reading and for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

My name is Vadim Kan and I am a senior course instructor at GoCoding in the United States.

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Hi @symphatixe, there is, in the Pro Guide, available from the CoSpaces Edu Pro training & PD page. You can welcome to create a tutorial at anytime in the Tutorial section of this forum.

One argument is that the admin interface shouldn’t try to replicate LMS features on platforms such as Google Classroom - a teacher can schedule work on such a platform and link directly to that CoSpaces assignment.

An alternative is to set up different challenges in different Scenes of a single CoSpace, putting the assignment instructions within the Scene (rather than using the Assignment instructions bit, which is very limited).

As a former webdev (and from years of submitting feature requests to CoSpaces), I think it would be helpful to the devs to reword your post to list out the features/solutions you’d like to see, with specific details and ideas on how it could work, plus the rationale.

Creating a single topic for a feature request is also helpful, so that request can be discussed by other members.

Finally, if you tag @CoSpaces_Edu they are more likely to see your post and pass things on to devs.

All your concerns are valid - it’s just that there may be ways around which are simpler to implement than developing a full-blown feature.

Many thanks,
Geoff @ TechLeap

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  1. Thank you for pointing me to the pro guide, I missed the chapter that was there for assignments, but I will probably make a post to cover limitations in the tutorial section so that teachers are aware of what the platform can and can’t do.
  2. That is a good point as well, however, in my case we are planning to give students their own accounts so that they can do homework at home which means giving them access to everything at once, even if it’s locked is too much information and it will be easier if they don’t have to see all that.
  3. I agree with the limitations to that and time wise as well. In addition, the ability for a student to access the scenes may lead to chaos as one may want to play around and since they are kids and having freedom may warrant them to breaking the instructions. There are workarounds of course and I agree with creating a full blown features may be too much, but some small quality of life changes would be nice.

I did get responses from the team when I emailed them, so some of the things I talked about will hopefully be implemented soon, but I will definitely take your feedback into account. Thank you for the note about rewording and placing my requests into separate posts so that people can agree/discuss one thing instead of many.

Best Regards,

Vadim

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