Productivity Limitation Wide Screens and Tabs

Lukas Müller

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Oct 16, 2023, 6:45:59 AM10/16/23

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Hi there,

I've been a long time user of OLAT and finally decided to share some feedback. I've been using it as a student as well as a lecturer for multiple years now. Overall, I like the platform and am happy.

However, there's one long-term issue I do have with OLAT, namely the fact that OLAT is limiting my productivity and is consuming my time due to its technical constraints.

What I mean by that: We do have multiple courses with most of the time a similar / the same structure. OLAT does force me to edit the courses in the one single tab in my browser, which is annoying. (1. suggestion) It would be a charm to be able to have multiple tabs of OLAT open at the same time in order to compare multiple courses and perform multiple steps at the same time.

Also, the layout is still oriented on the old "900 px width web development content panes". Therefore, a screen that is wider than 900px is useless and will not increase productivity, sadly.

I'm a bit of an extreme case here, using my super-ultra wide monitor, but this is still true for regular screen aswell as the increasingly spread ultra-wide monitors.

The picture attached maybe does give an idea of what I'm talking about.

(2. suggestion) Please at least provide an option to use OLAT on a wider screen effectively, such that regular content editing is not limited to the WYSIWYG editor width which is itself squeezed inside the 900px content pane.

In short:

Please allow multiple tab OLAT usage for effective and productive editing of multiple courses and so on.
Consider moving away from the limiting 900px width content pane that is old school and kills all screen area for screens beyond the 4:3 format.

Maybe there are options to use OLAT in a more productive way, as I described above, meaning I would be grateful for every hint.

Otherwise, consider this as a suggestion/critic/opinion that also other professors and lecturers do share.

Best regards

olat.png

Florian Gnaegi

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Oct 16, 2023, 7:03:06 AM10/16/23

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Hi Lukas

Thanks for your feedback. Luckily both problems are already solved.

1) Top nav sites, courses, groups and many other links can be opened in a new window. You can easily have multiple courses opened at the same time in different windows. Even the same course, once in the editor and once in the run view. No problem. Not all links however can be opened in a new window, you need to find the „right one“.

2) Using the full width of the browser is not recommended for usability and readability reasons. Many windows user maximize their window by default. Text however has a maximum width that is regarded as good legible. There is a reason why every newspaper has a fixed width for their news offerings. But, when working with large tables in OpenOlat using all available space is important to prevent horizontal scrolling. Unfortunately we can not adjust the layout depending on what the user intent is. Most scenarios where the full width would be used are power user scenarios. And for those power users we added button to switch to the full layout. Having this knowledge you can now consider yourself being a power user ;-)

See screenshots.

Cheers

Florian

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Lukas Müller

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Oct 16, 2023, 8:57:03 AM10/16/23

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Hi Florian,

Wow! Thank you for the hints as well as the quick response.

I'm wondering how I missed the features for that long. Since when are they available? I do remember multiple tab issues. It is a charm to know about them now, anyway.

One question: is there an option somewhere to always be in "full screen mode"?

In addition:

Somehow, the HTML-Site editor is limited to a certain width. This is also the case when using the view->full screen variant :-(
It does work when using the "Edit Site" button directly inside the course, instead of using the course-editor. Chrome is also a bit buggy with regards to the full screen mode in the WYSIWYG editor for the HTML-site component.

Thank you very much!

Best regards,

Lukas

Florian Gnägi

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Oct 20, 2023, 11:15:46 AM10/20/23

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Hi Lukas

I changed the width of the dialog when using the full-width (with the side effect, that many dialogs look very odd). It will be available with OpenOlat 18.1 next week.

Cheers

Florian

Am 16.10.2023 um 14:53 schrieb Lukas Müller <lukasmu...@gmail.com>:

Hi Florian,

Wow! Thank you for the hints as well as the quick response.
I'm wondering how I missed the features for that long. Since when are they available? I do remember multiple tab issues. It is a charm to know about them now, anyway.

One question: is there an option somewhere to always be in "full screen mode"?

In addition:
Somehow, the HTML-Site editor is limited to a certain width. This is also the case when using the view->full screen variant :-(
It does work when using the "Edit Site" button directly inside the course, instead of using the course-editor. Chrome is also a bit buggy with regards to the full screen mode in the WYSIWYG editor for the HTML-site component.

<olat1.png>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openolat/58595346-9a8b-4670-b0fc-7891df2add3cn%40googlegroups.com.
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