I have an LMS webapp for which I created an integration with Google Classroom. The integration can be enalbed by teachers on a per-course basis from an "integration settings" page of the course which, when the integration is enabled, looks something like this:
The integration enables features such as:
- when an exam is published on the course on my LMS, a corresponding coursework item is created on the paired Classroom course
- when an announcement or lesson is posted on my LMS, it is also echoed to Classroom
- when a student enrolls in a course on my LMS and it is paired with a Classroom course, then they are also enrolled in Classroom, and vice versa
I'm looking for a way to:
- clearly communicate the teacher that these features are enabled
- possibly give them some finer-grained control over when to use them
Having a page like the one shown above, even if it includes a list of features that the integrations enables, isn't enough: multiple teachers may publish material on the same course and not all of them may be aware the integration is enabled.
Here are some solutions I'm thinking about, but I am not sure which one is the best, if any--we'll take publishing an exam as an example feature, but the principles should apply to the other integration features too:
As a reference, this is the part of the exam editor that shows the publish button
Option 1) When the exam is published, together with the success snackbar which is normally shown, I may add a message saying "Your exam has also been published on Classroom: [LINK]". This gives the user no control over whether to actually echo the exam to Classroom, but it may not be an issue if the policy is "You use the Google Classroom integration if you want every piece of content to be sync'd." Still, in the first page I showed, I may add some course-wide settings, which is less fine-grained but may still be useful
Option 2) Before publishing the exam, I may ask the user for confirmation: "Do you also want to publish this on Classroom?". This may get annoying for expert users who know exactly how the integration work and want to always use it
Option 3) Beside the "Publish" button, I may have a switch/checkbox saying "Also publish on Classroom". Here the pattern is essentially that, when the integration is enabled for a course, in several places in the UI there will be additional controls to adjust integration-related settings. Here I would make an effort to distinguish those from the "normal" controls, e.g. by showing a Classroom icon besides them.
These are the options I have considered for now. Which one would be the best? Are there other options I may explore?