Colour coded metadata output for users.

At the May Streamline meeting I present the prototype in it’s current state (half baked). Since then I have so many other things to do I have had little time to fill in the missing pieces. That’s now underway and I anticipate good progress this month. Should have something user presentable at the very least.

Anyway while I’m hacking away I was thinking (I do that occasionally) about the comments made at the last meeting. One of the functions I have built in is a none-XML-marked up, human readable version of metadata content for a learning object. Basically a plain text version. This was done in response to some comments made at one of the eCat training sessions I attended back in January. One user pointed out that after filling in all (about a dozen) metadata screens the only way to check what you had done was to go back through all of them. There was no overview of the metadata entered, except of course as the outputted XML.

I made this screen really simple, just headings and metadata content associated with them, grouped in the UK LOM CORE structure, (I don’t wont it to be come a long overcomplicated input screen). One of the comments made by the Streamline members (I forget who) was that how do you identify what’s missing and then direct the user to where they can correct this. This was a fair point. Well I’ve tackled the first aspect of this by colour coding the output to highlight null or empty values. This screen shot shows the result. I also thought it might be useful to indicate the difference between manual, auto-generated and preference-generated input. I’ve got it working in a couple of instances but wanted feedback on whether it was worth while as it will take a couple of days to implement across the whole system.

I’m still working on the second part of that comment – directing the user to the correction point and will get back in due time.