[Using Sakai] Randomly assigning students to groups

[Marshall Feldman]

Adam Marshall wrote:


    another scenario could be to "randomly" create group but with
    constraints so that (say) the group has an equal number of men and
    women, or an even mix of ethnic minorities and so on.

    adam

Yet another scenario would be to use students' performance on previous 
assessments (exams, projects, forum posts, etc.) to "balance" teams via 
stratified sampling (e.g., equal distributions of "A" students, "B" 
students, etc.) or so each team has roughly the same average grade.

Since the Berkeley group is aiming to integrate these improvements in 
Sakai 3, hopefully Sakai 3 will have some sort of modular or "plug-in" 
architecture that allows the easy addition of incremental improvements. 
This way the group feature could start out addressing some of the 
scenarios and add more approaches to group assignment later on without 
having to wait for a major new release of Sakai to implement them. I 
also hope that Sakai 3 has an architecture that allows individual users 
or instructors to add or upgrade such plug-ins on their own, much as 
other open-source software (e.g. Firefox, Open Office, R) does now.

It's important to realize that at some universities even minor updates 
to Sakai may not be implemented for years if at all. At URI, for 
example, our IT group installed Sakai 2.5 last spring and currently has 
no specific plans to upgrade to 2.6. With WebCT, our IT group installed 
version 4.1 many years ago and never updated it. As of this past August, 
when they decommissioned the WebCT service, they were still running 4.1 
even though by then WebCT was on version 9 and its license covers the 
use of any or all versions at no additional cost. There is no reason to 
expect things to be any different with Sakai. Unless there a sea change 
here, we may never even see Sakai 3. (Hint: If you make Sakai 3 
substantially better or costless, this will have no discernible effect 
since the IT department does not itself benefit by upgrading or bear any 
cost for not upgrading. On the other hand, if you drop all support for 
earlier versions, which is what happened with WebCT 4.1, the IT 
department will be likely to upgrade because now they're exposed to risk.)

    Marsh Feldman

-- 
Dr. Marshall Feldman, PhD
Director of Research and Academic Affairs

Center for Urban Studies and Research
The University of Rhode Island
email: marsh @ uri .edu (remove spaces)


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