Partner institution: Interactive Communications & Simulations at the University of Michigan
The challenge
Earth Odysseys is a long-running program hosted by Interactive Communications & Simulations at the University of Michigan. Students in K-12 classrooms around the world read thought-provoking reports written for the project by travelers to a particular part of the world, and the reports become a starting point for online discussions of culture, geography, and history. Every two to four years, a fresh set of reports are commissioned from authors who are often college students or recent graduates. As the program unfolds over an academic semester, reports are posted bi-weekly, and the discussions are moderated by a team of university-student mentors.
In 2021, a grant through the university’s Humanities Collaboratory provided an opportunity for new content (this time focusing on Nubia) and a much-needed overhaul of the Odysseys website.
While the basic structure of reports and discussion suggests a straightforward design, the project has several needs that required special consideration, including:
- A single report might have hundreds of comments, and students need to be able to easily find responses to their own comments as well as the most recent comments in general, together with the context for those comments.
- For the students’ protection, they need to be able to log in and create a profile without using a personal email address or revealing any identifying information beyond their first name.
- Teachers need special privileges, including seeing all the reports in advance, and being able to monitor all of their own students’ activity.
- University mentors need to be able to follow individual “buddy” students and see all of their activity in one place.
The process
In collaboration with project leaders, I did a heuristic evaluation of the previous Odysseys website, and identified key features to keep, as well as priority features to add.
An especially tricky design challenge was the style of the comment threads. A nested discussion makes it easy to follow a discussion in retrospect, because replies to a comment are indented directly underneath. However, with nesting it is hard to find the newest comments, and indenting more than 2 or 3 levels makes the comments squished. On the other hand, with a “flat” comment thread, it is easy to find the newest comments, but hard to follow a back-and-forth conversation.
The solution
Open Social, an open-source distribution of Drupal, provided a starting point for the customization. I installed it on a Linux server.
Major modifications were made to the activity stream, so that the text of comments was visible and so that it was easy to go from the stream to viewing the comment in context. “User streams” were refined to make it easy to see all of a student’s postings in a list and in context.
In terms of threaded comments, the team decided that only two levels of nesting were necessary. For second-level comments, the “reply” link was changed to say “Add to this conversation,” and new replies are added to that same level. In practice, there are usually no more than a handful of replies to any first-level comment, so confusion is rare.
Together with user tagging and notifications, this solution met the key needs described above.