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.

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.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 1)

As you probably know, Sakai will be down on commencement day, May 20. This is to perform some major upgrades to Sakai as we update from Sakai 2.5 (the current version) to Sakai 2.6.

We at OIRT have been hard at work the last few weeks, doing final testing on our test servers. We are catching bugs, getting acquainted with the new system and any quirks it has, and customizing the "generic" Sakai system to look and feel like the Rutgers Sakai you have all grown accustomed to. The result, we hope, will be a smooth transition to Sakai 2.6, with few glitches, informed Sakai support staff ready to answer questions, and as little noticeable change in basic functions from the user perspective as possible.

So, what's happening? In my next few blog posts, I'll be writing about some of the changes and new features you can expect to see once Sakai 2.6 goes live. If you have any questions about any changes, feel free to leave them in the comments of the posts and I'll check back to answer.

General Changes

There are a number of changes happening behind the scenes, which users should not really notice (or in many cases even care about). I will instead focus my posts on interface changes, new features, etc. One thing I would like to mention though is that we are upgrading to the latest version of java. This should result in a faster Sakai. Some of the issues we encountered lately with Sakai being slow or unresponsive should be fixed with this upgrade.

Overall, the look of Sakai should not change too much. One difference is the button you press to get back to the home page of a tool.


Right now, this appears as a house icon:



In Sakai 2.6, we've changed this image to look more like the "refresh" button in your browser:



A big feature that has been added is the ability to view a site as a student/access user. This lets instructors see things exactly how a student in the class would see the site. No more worrying about whether or not the Announcement actually got posted, or what parts of the Gradebook and site participant list students can see! Also, for those of you who used to add yourselves to your sites as students, this should take away some of the need for that.

Another excellent feature is the ability to specify how many tabs you see across the top of your screen. If you're anything like me, over half of your screen may be wasted white space instead of convenient tabs. No longer! You can add and remove tabs just as easily as you can change the order in which they appear.

A handy feature (though rather a nuisance to test...) is a timeout warning before Sakai logs you off due to inactivity. Users will normally be logged off after 2 hours, but now Sakai will pop up a warning 5 minutes prior to logging you off, giving you the ability to remain active.

These features alone make me excited to see Sakai 2.6 go live. But that's far from all we're implementing. Improvements have been made to many tools, including Assignments, Chat, and Tests & Quizzes, to name a few.

But I'll save those for future posts.

Sakai Updates - 2/17/09

The following updates were made to Sakai on the Feb 17th restart. Questions about changes can be sent to sakai@rutgers.edu.

Interface

• The "more" dropdown box is now another tab titled "My Active Sites". This tab brings up a menu with your additional sites categorized by semester. Hidden sites will still not appear on this list. You can still change the sites you see in this list and which you always see as tabs through My Workspace -> Preferences -> Customize Tabs.

Resources

• Improved performance for sites with large file repositories

Tests & Quizzes

• Auto-save feature to save student work every 2 minutes
• Ability to import publisher content in more formats

Post'Em

• If a student appears on the spreadsheet to be uploaded but not in the worksite, the error message will now give the student NetID or RU ID# - whichever was listed on the spreadsheet. Previously, only the NetID was returned.

Adding Users to Sites

• Users can now be added to sites via NetID or RU ID#
• When creating a guest account for someone via email address, the site owner has the option to include a first and last name for the user immediately (note: this option is only available if the guest user has not already specified a name)
• Changed wording of notification email sent to users when added to sites
  

Other

• Documentation updates
• Changed wording on some buttons to clarify functionality