Upgrade StoragePublic closed group links failing when shared in Canvas
Apologies that I can't provide report IDs, I'm writing on behalf of 2 of my students and trying to understand what's up with their groups.
I'm a new librarian supporting a writing and research in a specific scientific discipline undergrad course at an R2 university. One of the assignments our students were given were to find some articles on a topic and share their article list (and prove they understood a Zotero lesson) by providing a link to a public closed Zotero group containing their articles via Canvas.
For 2 of my students out of 17, neither I nor the course instructor could access the groups -- both of us were getting messages reading "Library will be viewable after joining this group." when we navigated to their link. But in class, the 2 students were able to show us on their devices (both Windows laptops) that they had indeed created a public closed group that contained their articles. The rest of the class didn't have this issue and successfully submitted links to public closed groups.
For helping these 2 students complete the assignment now, and if I give this assignment again, why would most students' public closed group links work as intended, but 2 of them not? Are there troubleshooting methods I should use with these students, and better directions that I can use for future classes? For directions for this class, I shared the Groups documentation page with them during lecture and then walked around and individually helped answer questions about creating the group and sharing the link during work time. The goals of the assignment were 1. knowledge check that they can use, and are using, Zotero to organize their research; 2. make the article list easily available to the instructor to evaluate the articles they found so they can choose one to do 2nd assignment with.
I'm willing to provide screenshots of what I see when I navigate to their group links if that would be helpful, but I will blur out their personal info/not willing to actually provide the links, to protect their privacy. Thanks for understanding.
I'm a new librarian supporting a writing and research in a specific scientific discipline undergrad course at an R2 university. One of the assignments our students were given were to find some articles on a topic and share their article list (and prove they understood a Zotero lesson) by providing a link to a public closed Zotero group containing their articles via Canvas.
For 2 of my students out of 17, neither I nor the course instructor could access the groups -- both of us were getting messages reading "Library will be viewable after joining this group." when we navigated to their link. But in class, the 2 students were able to show us on their devices (both Windows laptops) that they had indeed created a public closed group that contained their articles. The rest of the class didn't have this issue and successfully submitted links to public closed groups.
For helping these 2 students complete the assignment now, and if I give this assignment again, why would most students' public closed group links work as intended, but 2 of them not? Are there troubleshooting methods I should use with these students, and better directions that I can use for future classes? For directions for this class, I shared the Groups documentation page with them during lecture and then walked around and individually helped answer questions about creating the group and sharing the link during work time. The goals of the assignment were 1. knowledge check that they can use, and are using, Zotero to organize their research; 2. make the article list easily available to the instructor to evaluate the articles they found so they can choose one to do 2nd assignment with.
I'm willing to provide screenshots of what I see when I navigate to their group links if that would be helpful, but I will blur out their personal info/not willing to actually provide the links, to protect their privacy. Thanks for understanding.
In a group's library settings, the owner or admin can choose whether the library is readable by anyone on the internet (for metadata, not files) or if it will only be readable by members.
So in future directions, I need to emphasize that in addition to making a public closed group, they need to ensure they check a setting to make it viewable?
Has there been discussion of good assignment design on here that would help show a knowledge check that students are using Zotero correctly without having privacy issues? I get that this makes their work public on the internet -- but not sure how actually "findable" their work would be. But, keeping their work as private as reasonably possible would be good.
The instructor and I discussed having them all add us to private groups vs. doing a public closed link and decided to try the link because of ease of pasting the link into a Canvas assignment (and not having 17 new groups added to our Zotero accounts).