Hi Doug,

I'm not finding much documentation on Slots, so if it's out there, can someone point me in the right direction?

To find a number of posts to the LON-CAPA mailing lists over the years to do with slots, visit the mailing list search page:

http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/swish.cgi

(referenced in section 2.2 of the PDF versions of both the course coordination manual and the authoring manual -- "Where to Find Additional Help")

and search using the term: Slots

(1) To create slots via csv file upload, what needs to be in the csv file? Is there a sample file somewhere?

To find out what needs to be in there create a csv file (e.g., slotdefs.csv containing:

examone,dmills:uiuc

Then log-in to a course as Course Coordinator, and use:
Settings > Slots > Upload Slot List

Click "Browse" to locate the slotdefs.csv file and click "Next".
In the Functions box click "Reverse Association".

This will show you a table with a list of attributes you might associate with columns from your CSV file. (For the two column file, examone might be the Slot name, and dmills:uiuc might be the "List of proctor ids".

If you will upload multiple proctor IDs, use a comma separator, but enclose the entry in quotes.

The attributes supported for CSV upload are:

Slot name
Type of slot
Start Time of slot
End Time of slot
Reservation Start Time
Reservation End Time
Message when reservation changed
IP or DNS restriction
List of proctor ids
Slot Description
Maximum number of reservations
Resource Restriction
Date range of slot exclusion
Secret word proctor uses to validate
Sections slot is restricted to
Users slot is restricted to

(2) How do you connect a given resource to a given set of potential  slots?

Display the resource, and click on "Content Settings".
Set the parameter: "Use slot based access controls" (useslots) to one of the "Yes" options.

If you have created student-schedulable slots, for which the start date and end date have yet to be reached, then students will be able to self-schedule access to resource(s) which have useslots set to one of the "Yes" options, using one of those slots.

If you have created instructor-assignable slots, then you can click the "Slots of availability" (available) parameter, and enter the name of the slot (or a : separated list of slot names, if more than one is to be assigned).

(3) What is the function of the "secret word" ?

This can be entered on the Proctor Validation screen in the "Password" field, by the Proctor instead of needing to enter the proctor's own LON-CAPA password.

The Proctor Validation screen is displayed when a student attempts to access a resource with slot-based control between the start date/time and end date/time for the slot being used for the resource, if not previously checked into that slot by the proctor.

(4) In setting up the slots, there are options for "Period of Time when this slot can only be uniquely chosen" -- the meaning of this and what it does is not clear to us.

Use this to ensure that a student does not reserve multiple slots in a given time period.

For example, say you have five labs available in a given week, but each student should only attend one of them, to complete a particular assignment. You would create a student-schedulable slot for each lab opportunity, and set the "Period of Time when this slot can only be uniquely chosen" (also known as "Date range of slot exclusion") to cover the entire week, for each of the five slots.

This would mean that a student could only hold a reservation for one of the five at any time, and if he/she wanted to attend at a different time from the one he/she had currently reserved, would need to drop the current one in order to be able to reserve another.

Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

Quoting "Mills, Douglas G" <dmi...@illinois.edu>:

HI All,

I'm not finding much documentation on Slots, so if it's out there, can someone point me in the right direction?

Here are some questions we are uncertain about:

(1) To create slots via csv file upload, what needs to be in the csv file? Is there a sample file somewhere?

(2) How do you connect a given resource to a given set of potential slots? We know there are the two interfaces -- the slot creation interface and the resource parameter interface, but is there somewhere where you say that Exam 1 can be taken in these particular slots and no others? Is that simply a byproduct of when Exam 1 opens and closes and the slots that are available in that timeframe? Or is there something else somewhere that helps control that?

(3) What is the function of the "secret word" ? In my testing I found that if I assigned a proctor from the course, I wasn't seeing that there was any need for the secret word. I had imagined that perhaps a blank in which to enter the secret word would appear when a student attempted to access a resource and an onsite (or online in a case like ProctorU) proctor would type the word in for the student and the student would continue from there.

(4) In setting up the slots, there are options for "Period of Time when this slot can only be uniquely chosen" -- the meaning of this and what it does is not clear to us.

Thanks as always!

Doug

Douglas Mills
Director of Instructional Technology
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois

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