Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 3)

Tomorrow's the big day! Here are the last of the changes we will be making:

Site Info

There have been some improvements to the "Import from Site" action in the Site Info tool. You can now choose whether the material you are importing should replace your current site material or be added to what is already there. You can also now import participants from another site, adding them to the participants already in your site (this only works with participants added individually, not with participants attached via roster).

Polls

You can now sort the poll results by their headers. This lets you display the poll options in order of most to least popular, for instance.

Discussion & Private Messages

You can now grade posts, either topic by topic or for an entire forum. With this enabled, an extra grading button will appear on your message board where you can enter numerical grades and textual comments for each student. You can also link these grades to the Gradebook tool.



Email Archive

In addition to general performance improvements for sites with many archived messages, you can now specify what appears in the "Reply to" field of messages. Previously, replies would be sent to the original sender only. Now, you can instead choose to have replies go to the email archive itself, allowing everyone in the site to see replies.

Schedule

You can now manually select which sites you would like to be included in your My Workspace Schedule tool, instead of always seeing scheduled activities for all sites to which you belong. You can also now subscribe to iCal calendars within the Schedule tool.

Dropbox

Similar to Assignments, there is a new option in Dropbox to download all content of the tool. This will give you a .zip containing a folder for each student along with any files that have been uploaded.

Assignments

This is another tool with a lot of changes...

Improved Grading Navigation

When you are grading assignments, there is now a previous, next, and return button to make it easier to grade lots of assignments in one sitting.

Improved Drafts Sharing

You can share drafts of assignments between instructors and TAs, instead of them being private only to their creator.

Custom Fields

When setting up an assignment, you can create some custom fields for various purposes:

• model answer/solution - This will be displayed to students when they view the assignment. You can specify when you want students to see this (as they work on the assignment or after it is graded, for instance).
• private note - This will be displayed on the instructor side during grading. You can decide whether you want to share it with other instructors or keep it private to yourself.
• all purpose item - This is additional information that doesn't fit into the other two categories. You can choose who you want to see it (students, instructors, etc), and when you want them to see it.
  

Improved Integration with other tools

Assignments that are posted in the Schedule and Announcements tools now have links from the post in the tools back to the assignment.

Find Missing Submissions Feature

This was actually available before, but was not linked anywhere. Sometimes students attach a file to an assignment, but don't realize they have to complete the second step of actually submitting the assignment and so the instructor does not receive a submission. In Sakai, when students attach files to assignments, they are saved even if the assignment is not submitted. There is now a "Find Missing Submissions" button when you are grading assignments, allowing you to see all attached files, whether or not the student actually submitted it.


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That's everything! All of these changes will be available after we complete the upgrade, which should be sometime late tomorrow (Wed) night.