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Course Design Orientation
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Alternatives to DENY
If for whatever reason you have to DENY applicants to your course you might want to find a kinder way of doing it and provide some form of positive fulfillment to the applicant's inquiry. For example you could reply that the present course is full and provide a date for for when the next session of courses start (April ??). Or you might engage the applicant to see if there are other ways in which they might contribute to the project. Or in appropriate situations you might offer to start a second session of the course if you can recruit sufficiently motivated and capable members and facilitators.
DENY has a very negative connotation in my opinion and you will be increasing the odds the applicant does not return if they are bluntly DENIED.
I put a comment in all those applicants that never got in because the course was full so that it didn't feel so negative.
How exactly does a denied application work? Do they get sent an automated message when that happens?
You might want to use a 2nd email account you have available, register and signup for the course and then then deny yourself and tell us what happens. I know it seems crazy but without every feature documented you have to find clever ways to experiment and see how the platform operates.
BTW, there should be more discussion here on the issues we are all experiencing or the problems are going to grow into full bloom when courses start next week.
Yes, I've set up myself as a "student" so I have a better idea how this is working from their perspective.
One useful idea to keep in mind: be sure to close the course to further applications when you have enough suitable people!
I just tried rejecting myself and there was no notification. There's also no way to send group e-mails to all rejected applicants. In fact, there is no way to even see all rejected applications on the site. The only record I have of their application would be the e-mail notifications, which can be turned off.
There should be a way to keep a list of rejected applicants, their applications, and a way to contact them en masse. Does anyone know how we can get involved in the dev of p2pu itself? :)
A list of all those of different status levels would be nice. That way you can send to all accepted, all denied, all waitlisted(?).
I've been eyeballing the dev of p2pu too. They're moving to Django -- which I'm learning anyway -- from drupal. A start: http://wiki.p2pu.org/w/page/31978748/Development-and-tech-team Also, there was talk on the google dev list about where they are in the process. I am really looking forward to contributing too!
I am sorting my applications in my gmail account and I plan to send out a note to all non-approved applicants that the course is full and choosing was exceedingly difficult.
Also, I've been so swamped in applications that I've missed just about every call and have basically had to audit THIS course. I think it might be useful to have this sort of discussion prior to opening courses for application in future, don't you?
I made a spreadsheet of all the applicants and sent all those that didn't make the cut a message explaining how full the course was, that I appreciated their interest, how they could participate by "lurking" and that we'd offer it again next term.
It was a very "manual" process though that was difficult to manage. Would be nice to have a way to do this through the system. (I'm going to try to suggest everyone use Forums or email for course communications because otherwise this is way to complicated for me to keep track of manually w/so many people.)
I set up a "student" acct for myself, applied to my course, and rejected myself. :( On my student account, I did not seem to get any message that I'd been DENIED. The only action was that the course no longer listed as "pending" for me. It just disappeared.
So....organisers may want to send a message to those who don't get it to let them know.
Here's a draft of mine:
Thank you for applying to the "____" course.
Enrollment is now closed, and unfortunately, we did not have room for you in the class. We received a very large number of applications and could not accept everyone. The quality of the applications was uniformly high.
Please feel free to "lurk" in the course and read along with us though if you'd like. In addition, we will be offering the course again next term. (If you reapply, make sure to mention that we didn't have room for your last term.)
Best of luck in all your endeavors!
I'm trying to do the applicants to my course this service of not leaving them in the dark, but the contact limit is making that difficult. I cannot contact more than 30 individual students per hour.
That would not be a problem, but I have over 150 apps for my course, and I've /expanded/ to 50 seats. I have about 47 apps that are first-tier "denys" and I'm trying to get those out of the way while vetting the rest, but now I have to stop, come back, and hope I do not lose my place, and do not forget to try to contact anyone.
BMT
I just ran into this too. Less than optimal.
I had to write a script to automate the process.
This may save you some time if you want to send the same message to a pile of users possibly customizing it with the user's p2pu handle. Navigate to the person's contact page and paste this "bookmarklet" in the the address bar and it will fill out the Subject and Message that are defined and automatically send the message. Rinse and repeat every hour.
javascript:
var P2PU_url=document.location.href;
var P2PU_user=P2PU_url.split("/")[4];
var P2PU_message="";
P2PU_message += "Greetings! ...";
var P2PU_subject="Course Information for " + P2PU_user;
jQuery("#edit-subject").val(P2PU_subject);
Drupal.ckeditorToggle('edit-message','Switch to plain text editor','Switch to rich text editor',1);
jQuery("#edit-message").val(P2PU_message);
Drupal.ckeditorToggle('edit-message','Switch to plain text editor','Switch to rich text editor',1);
jQuery("#edit-copy").attr('checked', true);
jQuery("#contact-mail-user").submit();
You can put HTML tags into the message but as pasted into this thread my [emphasis] tags were actually rendered and disappeared.
Excellent. Thanks!
For what it's worth, a message does automatically go to everyone who is accepted. It reads:
"The course organizer has reviewed all applications and approved you as a
participants for this course. Head to the course home page where you will
find more information on the next steps. Join the learning at
http://p2pu.org/general/[yourcourse].
If you are interested in getting involved with the P2PU project, have a look
at http://p2pu.org/get-involved
Best regards - Your P2PU Gang"