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Fall 2020 Release
The Mediathread team is celebrating the application’s 10th anniversary with a major release! The team set out a year ago to modernize and streamline the user-interface to provide a more accessible and intuitive experience for faculty and students. A comprehensive QA was completed in early August by staff members across the CTL. The team fixed bugs and added final polish for the release in late August.
The clean redesign and many feature improvements were unveiled to Mediathread power users at the end of August to positive feedback.
The Mediathread user-interface represented a patchwork of styles and approaches. The team has taken the opportunity to fully refresh the interface using a minimal, modern approach, leaning heavily on Bootstrap components like cards, accordions and badges. Every page in the site was updated to reflect the new design, achieving a consistent visual experience.
A new course homepage focuses on the collected course media, allowing a user to quickly see their media items or find instructions on collecting and uploading material. The collection space and annotation spaces were all migrated to the React framework in a move away from the aging sherdjs libraries.
The item detail space was redesigned to put the focus on the media, creating a significantly larger viewing area. The annotation process has been simplified to remove "item-level" notes and tags, a significant source of confusion to users over the years.
All video and audio files are now played through react-player, which supports a variety of format including YouTube and Vimeo. The OpenLayers library that underpins the image display and annotation was upgraded to version 6.x from 2.x.
A three-tab triptych offers omnipresent navigational access to the primary application sections -- Collection, Assignments and Projects. Assignments were separated from standalone projects to simplify workflow for faculty and students.
The composition assignment was re-conceived in a vertical space, ending the aging horizontal "sliding panels" interface that seemed so chic in 2011. The media window is significantly more prominent, creating a sleeker published view.
The discussion feature was transformed into an assignment and given a thorough review to fix bugs and user-interface awkwardness.
Assignments and projects are listed in a utilitarian table format, allowing quicker ways of finding information through searching and sorting.
The long-deprecated Lettuce integration tests were finally migrated to Cypress. All existing tests were rewritten in the new framework and additional tests added.
The course infrastructure was refactored to remove cookie'd context. Course ids were added to all urls to allow users to navigate directly to their class space.
Mediathread's publicly accessible pages now hold all the information about the application history, pedagogy and use cases. Our static site mediathread.info has been retired.
Additional core infrastructure improvements were completed to ensure the application is sustainable for many years. These included a Python3 upgrade and a Django 2.2 upgrade.