[Using Sakai] Problem/Fixes to Lessons

[Marshall Feldman]

Earlier today Josh Baron posted that the T&L is looking for feedback on 
enhancements to the Lessons tool. While not exactly enhancements 
(they're more like bug fixes and fixes to serious design flaws), the 
note below describes three serious problems I recently ran into with the 
Lessons tool. Since our support staff here has been preoccupied with 
trying to retrieve the lost data, I am posting a slightly edited 
transcript of my initial problem report.

---- Transcript begins here -----

I've added a Lessons page to my course site and authorized it to allow 
addition of student content to be used as an electronic portfolio of 
student work. The students must add a page for each week's material, and 
they must view the other students' portfolios and make comments. For 
ease of description call the first-level page I created "the root page," 
each student's first-level page, "first-level" (on these pages they 
create links to their weekly entries, so the first-level page acts as 
the student's table of contents), and each weekly entry (student's 
second-level pages), "weekly entry."

Here are the problems I'm having:

 1. I want to be able to grade weekly entries (both content and
    comments) separately. But Sakai seems to be only allowing grading of
    each student's comments in its entirety. In other words, on the root
    page where I've authorized addition of student content, clicking
    "Edit" opens a window where I can create Gradebook entries for both
    student content and comments. This creates a button to "Show a
    grading pane" on the root page where students content was
    authorized. But if I click through to the first-level and weekly
    entry pages, the grading button is no longer present; there is no
    way to grade each student's individual comments individually. How
    can one grade each comment individually?
 2. The above description applies only to comments students make about
    other students' pages: by authorizing students to post comments,
    comments on all levels of the hierarchy are enabled: root page,
    first-levels, and weekly entries, although grading is only enabled
    on the root page . But this is still better than what happens for
    the pages students actually create and submit for grading. Here,
    when on the root page I select the Edit button for the block of
    student contributions, a window opens up with a checkbox next to
    "Create gradebook entries for these items" and a text box next to
    "Maximum points." But when I check the box and enter maximum points,
    Sakai returns an error message. Unfortunately I can't report it here
    because of problem #3. But the gist of the message was that I was
    not allowed to add grading to student content, "most likely because
    a gradebook had not yet been added to the site" (which was untrue).
    Further accidental investigation (#3 below) suggests that this was
    due to the fact that students had already created several pages. How
    can one add grading for student content that already exists?
 3. In preparing #2 above, I went back to the site and tried to
    replicate the error message. I checked the box, entered a Maximum
    points, and hit return, thinking this would yield the error message
    that had appeared every time before. I'm not exactly sure what
    happened, but the entire section of student contributions
    disappeared. This seems to be because the default button on this
    window is to delete the entire section of student pages, which is
    what apparently happened. To try to fix this, I went back to the the
    root page and added another section for student content, but the
    original content (including my instructions on how to use the
    Lessons tool) did not come back. So how can one recover this lost
    content?

Comment. If my assessment of what happened with #3 is correct, this is 
an awful failure of user interface design. In other places Sakai's 
hand-holding goes to absurd lengths to prevent accidental mistakes (e.g. 
from Resources select Actions > Edit Details > Select URL (for copying), 
and every time a window pops up telling the user to remember to press 
Ctrl-C to copy the URL, with the user then having to press the OK button 
and then go back and hit Ctrl-C; it would be much more efficient to 
simply put text above the Details box saying, "Position your cursor in 
the box, and they press ctrl-A, followed by ctrl-C"). But here in the 
lessons tool, where students could have (and my students actually did) 
put in weeks of work, the default action (by pressing "Return") erases 
everything without any warning! How often does one delete the entire 
section of student contributions that deletion should be the default 
action? Don't "Update" or "Cancel" make more sense?

------- End of transcript -------

As I said, the local support staff has focused on restoring the 
students' work and has not yet begun to address the three issues 
mentioned above. Consequently the issues, their interpretation, and 
diagnoses are preliminary and somewhat conjectural. Nonetheless, 
whatever really is going on needs to be addressed.

If anyone can help by offering advice on how to address any of these 
issues, I'd appreciate that too.

Sincerely,
Marsh Feldman
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