Uploader Scenarios and Use Cases
Context Scenarios
Student
- Assignment submission (Primary): Ashley goes to the study room in the library and sits at a big table with her classmates. Today is the deadline for the weekly assignment for Archeology 232, and everyone is working on it together. Ashley logs into MSN and chats with a friend of hers, John, who took the course last year. John sends Ashley his old assignment over MSN. Ashley discusses John's answers with her friends she is sitting with. Once she has a completed assignment in a word document, she logs into Moodle, and opens up the Archeology 232 site. She clicks on Assignments, where she can view all of her previously submitted assignments, and submits the Word document she just finished working on.
- Design for: Uploading 1-3 files at a time; user is very careful about choosing what file to upload since it's for submission; likely to be medium sized (a few hundred KB) files.
- File sharing (Secondary): For a group project, Ashley's teammate, Fred, creates a project space on bSpace. To set up this collaboration area, Fred puts in a name and other details for the space, and entered in the username of each of the team members to give them the authority to use the site. The team members use it mainly for sharing documents, where as they preferred to use email and IM for communicating. On the group site, it is easy to see who uploaded what when, rather than sending the file around via email. Ashley found an old report from the previous term and decided to use it as a template for the group report. She changes the title, deletes the old contents, adds her sections, and uploads it onto the group site as final report version 1. There is no automatic notifications that go out to everyone, so she sends out an email to let everyone know that the first version is up online. The next person editing the document sends out an email saying he is now working on the master document. In the mean time, everyone else works on their sections independantly, so they can copy and paste into the master document when it is their turn. The night before the deadline, everyone sits in the computer lab to proofread the document together. Ashley makes the edits as everyone sits around her, reads, and discusses the report together. Minutes before the deadline, the group decides the report is in a good shape, and Ashley submits it in the course site. Everyone hifives each other.
- Design for: Uploading one file at a time; medium sized.
Instructor
- Course content upload in the beginning of the term(Primary): The semester starts in 3 weeks and Catalina is going to spend this Sunday getting the bulk of her course content on the class website. She's got a lot of her material pulled together already from previous semesters. On Sunday she gets up early. She likes to do large uploads to the course site then when there is less traffic on the site and the uploads seem to go faster. She logs into her course site, goes to the resource area and creates 5 new folders: Syllabus, Homework & Exams, Readings, Lab.  She just finished the syllabus last week so will start out posting it. She chooses upload file, finds the syllabus on her computer in My Docs>Spanish101>Syllabus>Syllabus_fall2008. She selects the file and uploads it in the Syllabus folder she just created in the course website. While she's uploading, she changes the name to "Syllabus Fall 2008", how she wants students to see it. She's going to start with last year's set of readings so she grabs all of them from her readings folder (within Spanish 101). As she grabs them, she realizes she needs to create folders for each week to put the readings in. After creating the folders she goes into week 1 and uploads all the files from the same folder on her computer. She does this for each week. Then she grabs all the homework & exams from last year and uploads them to her new course site. She'll have to update some of them for this semester but she can do that later. She'll also have to go back and rename each of the files for how she wants the titles displayed to students. Catalina does the same for lab. This can take awhile since the lab booklets include lots of images.  After the first few are uploaded she realizes she chose the wrong lab booklets. Seeing she has several minutes left on upload she chooses Cancel so she can start over. She reads the message on the computer letting her know the first 2 files were uploaded and lists all the files that were not. She quickly deletes the misuploaded files and starts the process over with the right group of files this time. Now that the base is uploaded, she'll continue to refine her course content over the next few weeks before she publishes it to students. For now, it's off for brunch with a friend.
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- Design for: Uploading 10+ files at a time; medium to large files.
- Design for user uploading wrong files and needs to cancel.
- Course content upload(Primary) : Catalina wakes up early Sunday morning and sits at her desk with a cup of tea. She opens her work laptop and logs into bSpace. She finds lecture slides and assignments for Spanish 101 for the upcoming week from span101/week11 folder on her computer. She typically keeps all files related to each week's lecture in one folder. This week's PowerPoint presentation is over 4MB with lots of pictures. She prefers not to deal with uploading contents when a lot of the students might be using the system. Instead, Catalina likes to use the system when system usage is low, such as Sunday morning, because she can upload contents faster without getting errors. She uploads the lecture slides and adds short one-liner descriptions to each file. She posts on the Announcement page to let all of her Spanish 101 students know that the slides and assignments are now available. She browses through some of the student discussion boards and logs out.
- Design for: Uploading 1-3 files at a time; medium to large (over 1MB) files.
Use Cases
Instructor
- Upload lecture presentations
- Post lecture outline to students (& give hard copy)
- Upload Syllabus
- Post content for next week
- Post readings each week
- Post course material at beginning of semester
Students
- Upload assignments for submission
- UPload personal files, such as pictures, for sharing
- Upload course notes, articles, presentation slides, PDFs, etc. for sharing
Instructional Designer
- Post material on course site for the instructors
Advanced Upload
- Upload multiple files
- Upload files regardless of file type
- Upload large files
- Upload and unpack a zip file
- Upload new version of document (replace or keep original)