Two enhancements would improve the Course Reserve process in our library: 1. (priority) Make all reserves visible to all patrons from the OPAC landing page (no log in necessary). Currently, only active courses are visible. This presents a problem when working with faculty in advance of academic terms to update and prepare their course reserves lists, for a variety of reasons. I'm also submitting a separate request re: admin actions in Course Reserves that relates to this issue. 2. Perhaps, there could also be a filter to allow patrons to sort out active courses, etc. This would also be useful, but not essential
I think a lot of libraries like the fact, that they can prepare the course reserves behind the scenes and that they are not visible to the patrons unless active. This should probably be a setting/option and not a general change. Could it be a compromise to make the courses visible to the added instructors?
Karen, that would not work for our purposes, for the following reasons: At the college where I work, I share the link to the Course Reserves with all faculty in preparation for the upcoming semester. I ask them to review the courses they will be teaching and respond via a form, linked to a spreadsheet that I then work from to organize, activate and prepare the lists. I often do not know exactly who will be teaching what, when, so it is not practical for me to activate all courses before getting these responses; I just send out the link and form to ALL faculty/adjunct faculty. Furthermore, once I activate courses so instructors can actually see them in Koha (ideally a month prior to the semester, to give me time to make purchases and procure ILLs), patrons are blocked from borrowing those books. That's not necessary, so far in advance We aren't concerned about Course Reserves lists being "behind the scenes" because our course reserves are not private or confidential. I think that most student patrons rarely use this function in the OPAC, and when they do, it's for a course they're enrolled in, which would in that case already be active and ready to go. You could also put a clear note about this beside course reserves search bar/page in the OPAC: "Course Reserves are subject to change. A list is not confirmed and available until marked 'Active'." (Or something along those lines.) Perhaps, users could even apply a filter to show 'active' courses only.
I think it could be a configuration option, but I still think a global change of behavior is not what we should do here. We need to keep in mind that a lot of libraries use this feature already and while we had other requests, this hasn't come up yet, so I would assume most are ok with the current behaviour. I also feel like explaining active/inactive to users/patrons is not something that would be easy to do. Other ideas: * a new flag for 'visible in OPAC when not active' * a global setting/system preference to change the behavior of active