First, I agree that this is a piece that you want to make available as a template bit that designers can place anywhere on the page. I don't really have a sense of how easy templates and portlets are for typical page designers to use at this point, but I would think that making it easier for them to move things around on their own is a priority.
A few thoughts:
- The current design of check boxes won't scale. What if your course is 25 pages?
- What the progress bar currently represents is a table of contents plus visual indicators of what you've seen on that table of contents. We use a device like this all the time in our courses, usually in the form of an always-visible left-side menu. I would suggest that you represent this data in an easily retreivable data format (e.g., XML) that designers can use to draw whatever visual representation pleases them.
- Another common form of progress bar in online courses scales by omiting page titles. Page counters (e.g., "page 3 of 15") and literal progress *bars* that show you a visual representation of the percentage of task done.
- If you do separate data from presentation in a way that's easily manipulated by page designers then it would be nice to include several sample templates. Definitely more than one.
- While I agree with Don that frames is a bad idea, I wouldn't mind seeing at least one template use layers to do the same thing (provided that we also include at least one template that sticks with least common denominator technology). Layers is the right way to do what Carl has in mind and not all owners of these systems will be reluctant to specify 4.x browers or above (or even 6.x browsers or above).
