November 11, 2019 Update: Lesson Co-Authoring

Government Platform

LessonGin

Lesson authors may now asynchronously collaborate! The author of an unpublished lesson may “assign” it to another user as a co-author for a period of time. Here are the details:

  • An author can add one or more co-authors to their lesson via their CL-150 username. Co-authors can be added when first creating a lesson, or any time thereafter (when a lesson is in a draft or even published state).
  • An author can create an “authoring group”, which, similar to a “contact group” in an email client, allows them to easily add a predefined group of authors to a lesson all at once.
  • An author can assign the editing rights of a lesson to any co-author, which gives the co-author full editing capability (editing article text, vocab items, activity configurations, etc), including the ability to publish the lesson. The original owner of the lesson can also set a deadline that will appear as a guideline to the co-author to complete their edits by. When the co-author has completed their edits, they can assign the editing rights back to the original owner. An author and their co-authors can pass the editing rights of the lesson back and forth as many times as they’d like – with the editing rights always belonging to one user at a time.
  • A new commenting feature allows all co-authors to leave comments for each other, facilitating collaboration in the creation of a lesson. Authors can tag users in their comments to call their attention, and even tag their comments as relating to a specific screen (which can be useful when using the Filter functionality to only show comments related to specific screens).
  • Co-authors can clone lessons that they are a part of, giving them the ability to clone a lesson which they didn’t initially create.

A few other LessonGin features released as well:

  • Added an option to show/hide an end-user warning that machine translation may have been used to create lesson materials.
  • No longer convert uploaded sounds to 22khz (except for embedded sounds in companion PDF files, which use reduced-quality sounds to maintain a small file size).
  • The My Lessons screen was redesigned to better support co-authoring.
  • The Files and Links screen was redesigned to better support co-authoring.