Specific questions about courses

Request Type: 
Office Hours
Forums: 
Managing and Creating Content
Author: 
Natalie Weber
Issue/Request: 

I have some very specific questions about Courses, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone via email. Is it possible to set up office hours to go through these questions and a few other unrelated questions?

I’ll ask the Courses questions here.

Our Course listing is here: https://dev.ling.yale.edu/academics/courses

  1. Big question first: is there anyway to pull course information from the OCI to dynamically create Courses each term, and then be able to modify the Courses and tag them with course types? If we want to use the Courses feature in drupal, must we manually enter courses?
  2. The default split between “Undergraduate” and “Graduate” courses wasn’t useful for our department, so I added some other course types. I then deleted the “Undergraduate” and “Graduate” course types, which of course breaks the two views: “Undergraduate Courses Page” and “Graduate Courses Page”. I can’t figure out how to delete/remove these.
  3. When a viewer navigates to the Courses page, I have all of the possible course types display by default. Viewers can then change the filter criteria if they want to view just one or several course types. I would like the courses to be listed by course type in the order that they appear in the filter; that is, “First year seminars” on top (there are none this term), then “Introductory courses”, then “Intermediate courses”, etc. Right now, for some reason “Languages” displays first, and “Seminars” occur before “Senior Requirements”. 
  4. We would actually like to not have “Languages” listed here at all, because the ASL program is separate from the Linguistics program. Eventually we might have a separate page hosted on our website for the ASL program, and the ASL courses could be listed there. I suspect the solution might be to create a new Content Type which is just like Courses in every other way… We do, however, want the ASL courses to be listed on the professor’s People page, just like all the other courses are listed via the Dynamic Faculty Block. So in that way, the ASL courses seem like a subtype of Courses, and not a new content type. Any ideas on how to implement this?
  5. I tried to change the site structure a bit so that Courses are housed under the main menu link “Academics” (url: academics/courses instead of /courses). I think I did this simply by changing the menu link location, but not quite everything seems to have worked as I expected. When you create a course, apparently they get given their own page, such as this one: https://dev.ling.yale.edu/academics/courses/ling-254654-syntax-ii#
    • I’m not sure how anyone would access those particular pages, but still: the URL path reflects the menu hierarchy, but if you go to that page you will see that the breadcrumbs do not. They have: home > courses > ling 254/654: syntax ii
    • I’m not sure how to change the breadcrumbs, basically, although it might not matter ultimately.

Thanks for any help!

Alyssa DeChiaro on February 20, 2019:

Hi Natalie,

I will address your questions below:

1. Right now there is no way to pull course information automatically, though there was an on-going project between multiple teams in ITS so it may be available at some point in the future, so for now you will have to create courses manually.

2. I am not seeing the Undergrad and Grad courses views - do you have links? I do see the Undergrad and Grad pages but they are separate than the main courses view.

3. I will play around with the view settings to see if I could get this displaying that way.

4. I deselected the Languages type option from the filter in the view and that makes it so that they don’t display on the main courses pages, but they will still display on the professor pages. Will this work?

5. I think it would be difficult for a user to get to an individual course page, but if you’d like for the breadcrumb to be Academics > Courses > Course_title we could do that - I actually did this so you can see if that’s what you were thinking. But it wouldn’t be a huge deal if we left it as it was since the users just need to get back to the main course listing through the breadcrumb. This gets set under the Custom Breadcrumbs settings: Structure > Custom breadcrumbs, then edit the Course node type and you’ll see where I’ve edited it.

Best,

Alyssa

Natalie Weber on February 20, 2019:

I will address your questions below:

1. Ah bummer, but yes, hopefully in the future!

2. This is fixed… I figured out how to delete the Undergraduate and Graduate views after posting. Thank you!

3. Thanks for working on this…

4. This seems to have removed the “Languages” option from the exposed filter at the top, AND seems to have rearranged the display order (? unless you figured something out on that), but if you scroll down you will still see “Languages”.

But yes, that would be a perfect solution! If we later create an ASL language program page, then I’ll make a new filter that only displays “Languages” on that page.

5. Yes, thank you! I also think it’s unlikely that a user would get there, but now I know how to change it, so that’s great. :)

Alyssa DeChiaro on February 20, 2019:

Ah yes you’re right. I’ll have to play around with the view settings to see if we can fix that RE: the Languages courses.

Alyssa DeChiaro on February 20, 2019:

Oh I think I got it! I had to add another filter criteria to not include any courses that are tagged with the Language course type.

Natalie Weber on February 20, 2019:

Ah, brilliant! Thank you.