[DG: Teaching & Learning] Sakai-11 - proposal ideas

[Gregory Guthrie]

I wasn't sure if this was the best place to post ideas and suggestions for future Sakai versions - but here goes...

I would like to see more analysis tools in next versions of Sakai.

1) One might include some analysis of faculty and course interactions in the forums - and although defining the metrics would be the most important part of this, perhaps things like (thread depth, average response time, size of responses (to eliminate "me too! and chatter responses), faculty response time, number of 'like's to posts (per student, per faculty), ...).

This would allow one to oversee a group of courses to see how interactive faculty are in their support of a course, and also how engaged in participation students are in a course(s).

2) A second area would be institutional reporting and accountability. This would include items perhaps like: (student forum submissions (pre student, per course), responses, assignments submitted (%age), date of last interaction, ...). This is important both for QC of course quality per these measures, but also a legal requirement for Federal Financial aid support.

3) One implementation feature to support this would be more automated ways to extract reporting data from Sakai. The sitestats reports are useful, but very limited in their range and format.
    We have setup one approach to this, where any internal report in sakai can be automatically extracted (csv, xml, json) so that external presentation and analysis tools can be used to better present, integrate, and aggregate it. From that we can then correlate data from various reports and give evaluation and performance tracking tables for each (and all...) courses.

(I think that the Canvas LMS has some nice examples of such data access and reporting tools.)

4) A system of hierarchical reporting tools for : ( courses, faculty, departments, school, ...) so that administrators could easily QC and track the overall quality of courses using Sakai, perhaps most importantly for DE courses.

If other Schools have already discovered or setup good ways to do this, we would love to hear of it.
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