Overview

Group admins can add notices that persist throughout the group context using the standard rich text editor.

Extra features:

• Optional different notices for discussions, blogs, files, pages and bookmarks.
• Choice of notice position (sidebar top, sidebar bottom, as banner on the top or bottom of the group page)
• Format options: choice of background colour, border/no border, curved corners

Typical use-cases

• A banner that is displayed wherever you are in the group
• Instructions/expectations about how different tools might be used in the group
• Group news
• Group help
• Links to important group pages
• External links
• etc
• etc

To install - no special configuration options, just put it in the mod folder

To use - the plugin adds configuration items to each group's Edit page. Self-documented.

Why we made this

This is a quick and simple plugin but it performs a useful function. We mainly need it in our context because we have hundreds of different groups that play many different roles, which tends to lead to confusion as people move from one group to the next and are not sure what to do, where to go, what is expected in each one. For example, in some groups there's a shared blog, in others it's used for news. Some make special use of pages, others prefer bookmarks. Group owners often provide such info in the group description or widgets, but this is not visible once you move away from the group profile. For things like courses where instructors often ask students to visit a different page, which may lead to others, this can be very confusing and can lead to a disjoint experience with a lot of to-and-fro between pages. This plugin makes it easy for group owners/admins to help members get oriented and can help make groups less disorienting.

This plugin was built for and on behalf of Athabasca University.