[Building Sakai] Tell us about your users: Rethinking the capabilities of learning activities tools, such as Tests & Quizzes, for 3.0

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Hello
Early in 2010, Stanford plans to begin rebuilding the core functionality provided by Tests & Quizzes 2.x releases (aka Samigo) in the new 3.0 environment. However, we do not want to simply rebuild it based on the current design. Sakai 3.0 allows us the opportunity to make the functionality formerly associated with tools accessible in other contexts; in other words, the functionality of T&Q and similar tools can now be modularized so that users can create or complete activities without necessarily entering a specific tool. Working in 3.0 will also allow us to utilize Web 2.0 interaction styles that simply weren't around when T&Q was initially designed.

We plan to sponsor a 3-month investigation phase beginning in mid-September to help us understand the range of people who use Sakai to create, manage, complete, and assess learning activities and how they think about their work. We want to have a solid understanding of the historical issues, user types, and user goals before we begin designing in January. We believe that understanding how various users really think about their work will lead to new ideas for how workflows need to be structured and interrelate to each other. In other words, it should help us to understand the commonality between workflows that currently occur in multiple tools in multiple ways. Also, although we are not immediately integrating with the workflows of communication, scheduling, and grade reporting, we would like to know how and when users expect their work surrounding learning activities to integrate with those workflows.

This investigation will conclude with an analysis of our findings, including key user types and their functional needs; this phase will lead directly into recommendations for design. Therefore, we hope that a broad range of institutions will contribute to this investigation, especially by providing end-user profiles based on local interviews of instructors and students regarding the work they do with tests, quizzes, and other graded assignments. 

If you are interested, please read more about participating in the investigation and sign up for a kick off meeting in mid September 2009 at

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/Investigation+Phase

 Although it's likely that instructors and students at Stanford are similar in fundemental ways to many users at other schools, it's also likely that other schools have different classroom structures (difference in class size, involvement of assistants or instructional designers, distance learning, and pedagogy) that will have implications for how their users need to work; we want to take these into account as well.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Keli Amann and Jackie Mai
User Experience Specialists
Stanford University, Academic Computing