Difficulty levels

["Ilya A. Volynets-Evenbakh" <ilya@total-knowledge.com>]

OK. Let's go over this in detail.

First what we want to achieve.
There are objects whose presentation order is undefined.
i.e. What order do we show explanations in, when topic is first accessed?
What order do we preset problems to solve in?
Sure, some times it's rigidly defined by teacher (i.e. problem B must
be solved only after problem A is solved), but sometimes it
doesn't matter as much. At the same time we may want to provide
teacher to give some guidance to students. One such way is to allow
to set "difficulty" level on objects, and then have student set their
preferred difficulty level (on per-course basis). Then, when rendering
object lists, objects of his preferred difficulty level will be rendered
first.

Now questions:
1. What object difficulty level should be bound to? i.e. can same problem
    have different levels in different courses. How do we organize that?
    What if the problem is in different courses as a result of being
included
    in some sub-topic...
2. Who sets the difficulty level? Should it be affected by user votes?
3. Should we allow authors arbitrary levels or should we have a
predefined set?
4. Should we allow authors arbitrary level names or should we just stick
with numerics?

If you have more questions, add them to the list.

-- 
Ilya A. Volynets-Evenbakh
Total Knowledge. CTO
http://www.total-knowledge.com