Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 2)

Here is the promised Part 2. I'm going to start listing 2.6 changes based on tools from this point on.

Announcements
You can provide an RSS feed for people to subscribe to your announcements in a site. Only the announcements set to "public" will appear in this feed. All other announcements will only be viewable by members of the site.

Chat Room
Multiple chat rooms were available in 2.5, but now you can link directly to the different chat rooms in the left tool menu. This saves people from having to manually move from the default chat room to the one they want. Simply add a second Chat Room tool (Site Info --> Edit Tools) and then set the second Chat Room tool to default to another specific room.

Gradebook
Similar to how you can upload multiple Resources in one shot, you can now add multiple Gradebook items at the same time. While you're adding Gradebook items, you can click "Add Another Gradebook Item" to bring up the option. How many can you add at once? I'm not actually sure. I got bored and quit when I reached adding 30 items at once.

Tests & Quizzes

This tool has received the most attention in the 2.6 upgrade. It is very complex, which gives it a lot of room to grow. There are a lot of new features here, so I'm giving it its own category.

Assessments can now be released to specific groups within a site
If you use the "Manage Groups" option in the Site Info tool to split your Sakai site up into smaller groups of students, you can release assessments in the Tests & Quizzes tool to only students within certain groups. If you have used this in the past with the Assignments tool (for example), this new feature works the same way.

Changes to question with multiple answers
Multiple choice questions can have more than one answer. There are now two ways to do this:

1. Single selection - A or B is correct, students choose one answer and receive full points if they choose either
2. Multiple selection - A and B are correct, students choose many answers and receive partial points for each correct selection while losing points for incorrect selections

Before, only option 2 was available.

Questions can be set to negative point values on an incorrect answer
If you want to dissuade guessing on a quiz, you can make students lose points if they answer a question incorrectly.

Question pools can be shared with other site members
In the past, question pools were user-specific. Now, you can share your question pools with someone else, allowing instructors to collaborate on quiz questions within a Sakai site.

Assessments display a "last modified by" date
From the instructor's side, if an assessment is modified, the date, time, and modifier will appear next the assessment name. For students, if an assessment is modified after they have already submitted it, a warning note will appear: "This assessment has been modified since you submitted it. Please consult your instructor if you find any discrepancies."

"Quick create" feature for creating assessments
When creating a new assessment, you have the option to use "quick create". This will allow you to do a mass input of questions in a specific format, instead of entering questions individually using the normal Sakai interface. The format is pretty standard to what quizzes look like if they are formatted in, say, Word (questions listed, then answers, with an asterisk in front of the correct answer).

Once you add the questions, you can continue on to create the assessment. Sakai will take what you entered, create questions out of it, and give you the option to make any changes necessary. Then all that is left is to go through your settings (delivery dates, feedback options, etc), and you're ready to publish.

Assessments will be submitted at deadline
As of last semester, timed assessments would auto-submit when the time limit was reached. Now, regular assessments will also auto-submit when the deadline for the assessment is reached. If students begin an assessment, save for later, and don't come back to submit it (or simply forget to hit the final "Submit" button), the assessment will automatically go through at the due date.


There are also a few smaller improvements/changes to Tests & Quizzes which may not be noticed by the casual observer. Those are all the major ones, though!

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I still have some more updates to go over. Part 3 will come out early next week with the rest of the changes in Sakai 2.6.