[Building Sakai] [Management] Working toward a Message and Forums Release

Thu Nov 5 14:50:30 PST 2009

Hi Megan
We're still planning to review this in detail today and tomorrow by actually looking at the documentation included in JIRA (on a UI level, not code), but from a quick review of the titles of the improvements, it looks good. 

A little background--Stanford has been using a 3rd party discussion board integrated into our local instance of Sakai. This needs to be retired because we've been told it will no longer be supported if it breaks. We are piloting Forums and hope to move to it completely next fall and retire our legacy system. 

 At the end of Spring 2009, we sent a questionnaire to about 20 pilots, but only 2 replied. One was happy with Forums as is, one who made more extensive use of Forums, had more specific feedback. I think SAK-17315, judging solely by the title, will take care of at least one onf their needs, since they need to see a display of all a users postings so they can evaluate the quality of a their posts and assign a grade. We would like to put together two questionnaires that those piloting Forums are required to fill out, prior and after the term, so we can get more feedback.

In addition to working backwards from what pilot users identify as gaps from the legacy system, We are  also trying to work forward: is there anything about the way instructors are using the legacy system now that would indicate we need to enhance Forums? We've asked masters students in our Learning, Design, and Technology program to interview instructors and TAs in various departments and to share their results. It may be that some instructors will likely take Forums as is, others may ask for specific things according to their course needs (like example above). We may even find that the way they are using the discussion tool would better be met by a completely different tool (Some use it as a Signup tool or as a peer review tool.). We're talking to a few people who have  decided to scrap discussion tools altogether and use an external blog or mailing lists; we want to know if it's because those modes of communication are actually more appropriate for their purposes. These masters students have also talked to other students to get their perspective, which we think will be useful.

We'll then be busy trying to retire our legacy tool and make any prioritized changes to Forums locally. Of course, we'd like to minimize the amount of local coding we have to do so we'll be looking for existing JIRA entries if our investigation describes needs that others are already trying to address and see if we can provide additional user data if desired. If our developers have to create original code, no doubt they'll want to be in touch with someone--Megan, are you the best point person for Forums? I don't know when your 2.8 release is, but if we discover local needs that we think are universal, we'll want to talk to someone about how to contribute that to a future release.

Just an FYI,

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing, Stanford University

P.S. Is the Google spreadsheet that Clay put together 
(http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Proposed+Sakai+2.7+Changes) also being updated, or is it defunct for your purposes? We have recently put together a page describing plans for SAMigo 2.7 ( http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAM/SAMigo+2.7+plans) but it links to that spreadsheet.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Megan Marie May" <mmmay at indiana.edu>
To: "Megan Marie May" <mmmay at indiana.edu>, "sakai-dev" <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>, management at collab.sakaiproject.org
Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2009 10:53:59 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] [Management] Working toward a Message and Forums Release

Hello again, 

Quick reminder that we’re still seeking community feedback. So far we’ve received no negative feedback. In fact, a patch has even been provided. 

There have been some additions to this list 

· Allow an individual forum message to be linked to directly and puts a "permalink" in the individual message view (SAK-15592) 

· Add text-length validation in titles and textareas (SAK-10503) 

o Many thanks to Sam Ottenhoff for providing the patch 

Thanks, 

Megan 

From: management-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:management-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of May, Megan Marie 
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 5:06 PM 
To: sakai-dev; management at collab.sakaiproject.org 
Subject: [Management] Working toward a Message and Forums Release 

Good afternoon, 

There is a multi-institutional team working on a message center release (ie Messages and Forums) with a goal of releasing by mid-December. The intent is that this release will then be included in Sakai’s 2.7.0 release. 

There are a number of functionality changes planned for inclusion. Many of you have already seen this list but we wanted to circulate the list of proposed changes one last time for questions, comments or concerns. The list with JIRA #’s and supporting documentation is below. 

Changes Proposed 

· Option to enable property so forum posts are marked as read after displaying all messages (SAK-10869) 

· MyWorkspace synoptic view of unread Message and/or Forum counts (SAK-17314) 

o http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/HgCZAQ 

· Ability to email author of message/thread (SAK-11740) 

· Display count of how many people have read a message (SAK-10559) 

· Email notification of new posts( SAK-11740) 

· Display of all of 1 users postings (SAK-17315) 

· Display last activity time and sort by recent activity (SAK-9806) 

· UI Makeover (SAK-13870, SAK-14950 & SAK-15535) 

o http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/EoLgAw 

· New and empty tool pre-populated with default forum and topic (SAK-11167) 

Please feel free to voice comments on list or you may document them on Confluence [ http://confluence.sakaiproject.org//x/igAAB ] between now and Friday, November 6 th . 

Thanks, 

Megan 

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