When creating a course, the Masquerade as User feature is helpful, but it takes a lot of clicks to get to a user account and masquerade as them and then find the course you were working on and then view each course object and then toggle back, make changes, then have to go back again to find the user again, etc…
It would be MUCH faster if I could either (a) see how the course looks as a user when I click View instead of how it looks to an admin (I really don’t care about that, but I’m brand new here so I don’t know what the value is of viewing a course as an admin) or (b) have a “View as User” option for all courses and course objects direct from the Course Outline.
Hello, I consider us in the new phase as well, and I agree that being able to have the option to have the “user view” would be helpful. perhaps an option on the landing page (default would be Admin View, and we can click on “User View” option to enable and then revert back to Admin view). It would be helpful if when under this “User View” mode, the activity date would not come into play… that way we get to see what the user will actually see/experience when the activity is live.
vote for the toggle between the two!
Hello! I have two workarounds for this:
1 - Joel recommended that I create a “learner” account that does not have any admin rights. I primarily use Chrome as an admin, and log into Firefox as my learner account where I can view everything. This allows me to update on Chrome and simply refresh the Firefox screen to see edits.
2 - I open a new tab and find the user’s name. I can go back and forth between my account and the user’s and update the course on the other tab if need be.
I think if you put this in the “product suggestions” we would upvote it. It seems perfectly reasonable to have a “Preview as User” button here and it seems like a very good idea.
I’ve moved this to the “product suggestions” section.
One consideration for everyone is that “user” is not easy to define. For example, consider user types for credit, access control rules, member status, durations, logged in/out, etc.
This would be a nice tool to have. I have 3 profiles I jump between and while that workaround works it’s still a workaround.
I would assume with “user” we’d imply a logged in user. At least our ability to masquerade as it is now assumes the view of a logged in user. But perhaps the “view as user” view could adopt whatever settings the admin profile has. So if there’s a reason a course would look different between an MD and an RN or some other variable(s), I just make the selections on my personal settings and that updates my preview. If possible, that could cut out some clicks and how often we use our multiple personalities
Just a follow up to that. If you have a demo learner, you can just open an incognito window in Chrome. That way you will see how the system is acting in Chrome, which is what I mainly use and suggest that our customers use.
To echo what jrosenfeld said, you can definitely do this with a second browser (which is my preferred method).
However, another way to do this is by having a test profile (or multiple - I have a test learner and test faculty), and bookmarking the “Masquerade as user” link.
To do so, right-click the link and select select “Copy link address”.
Then open up the bookmarks manager on your browser (Ctrl+Shift+O on Google Chrome).
On the top right open the menu (the three dots) and click “Add New Bookmark”
Name the bookmark something appropriate like “Ethos Learner View” or “Faculty View” and paste the URL on the URL Field.
Once you’re done you can move the bookmark to the easiest place for you to find and click it as need. This will automatically switch you to masquerade as the chosen user. I like this because I can use it to set up multiple, easy to access, user-view short cuts.
Just to add on to what I started… as I’m getting more accustomed to Ethos, I’m finding that the different browser or masquerading functions only work after you’ve published a course. You can’t check it as a user while you’re building it. It would be great to have that feature so you can check it for proper functionality before it goes live.
I am new to posting, but this is something our team would like as well. While we realize you can “work around” the issue, a user view would be much appreciated!
