Feature: Change AI course summarise button placement

[larsbonczek]

Is your feature request / improvement related to a problem? Please describe.
Moodle 4.5 introduced a new AI Subsystem which (among other features) can be set up to allow students to generate a summary of the text content of any activity page (see here). When this feature is enabled, a "Summarise" button is added above the content of each activity page:

When clicked, this button opens a new drawer in the same position as the block drawer:

We find this button to be quite intrusive as it takes up valuable vertical space even though it is not relevant for many users. We have already received complaints about this from some of our users.

Describe the solution you'd like
We would like to add an option to change the placement and look of this button using Boost Union.

I have come up with four suggestions for the new placement, which I will present here.

Suggestion 1: Make the button a header action (like the "Manage courses" and the "Create course" buttons on the "My courses" page). This moves the button to the right of the activity title, but leaves its design unchanged. This is easy to implement.

Suggestion 2: Add the button to the list of additional buttons in the context header (like the "Message" button on the user profile page). This places the button directly after the activity title and changes its design to be less intrusive. This is a bit more difficult to implement and will probably require some code duplication.

Suggestion 3: Add a new drawer toggle below the toggle for the block drawer. This makes sense semantically because the summarise button opens a drawer when it is clicked. It prevents the AI drawer from being opened while the block drawer is open, though. This could get tricky when it comes to styling.

Suggestion 4: Add a new footer button above the default one (just like the accessibility support link which is already offered by Boost Union). This is easy because it reuses the functionality already implemented in Boost Union, but we might need to review the styling on small devices (it seems to interfere with the block drawer toggle).

My personal favourites are 1 and 4, but I'm interested in hearing different opinions. If multiple versions are desired, we could allow admins to select one of multiple options.

Describe alternatives you've considered
An alternative would be to tell users who do not want to see the button to remove it using a client-side browser add-on (e.g., an ad blocker). But there might be users who are just annoyed by the buttons placement and not the button itself.

[abias]

Hi @larsbonczek ,

many thanks for creating this improvement proposal.
First of all, I think you should raise this topic in the Moodle tracker as well (if you haven't done already). The AI subsystem is currently a hot topic for Moodle core and maybe they are open to improve this in Moodle core.

Then, looking at Boost Union, I think that it would be quite easy to add a setting for this placement modification.
I think you have already created a good set of possible solutions.

Looking at your possibilities and looking from a UX perspective, I would prefer option 1 or 4 as well.

However, looking at the implementation aspect in Boost Union, I would try to avoid option number 4 as we already have several additional footer buttons there (the question mark icon from Moodle core, the chat icon from Moodle core (if enabled), but also our back to top button from Boost Union and the accessibility form button from Boost Union). Furthermore, we have settings to control on which screen sizes which button should appear. All in all, adding another button might raise the implementation complexity of the footer region dramatically.

So I would give my +1 for option number 1.

Cheers,
Alex

[larsbonczek]

Hi @abias,

thanks for your input! I will go forward with option number 1.

I have also created an issue in the Moodle tracker, as you suggested: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-85380. Let's see if that leads anywhere :)

Cheers,
Lars