[Using Sakai] Problem/Fixes to Lessons

[Charles Hedrick]

On Nov 25, 2013, at 7:41 PM, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu> wrote:

> 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:
> 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?
No. The assumption was that comments would likely lead to dialogs. Facebook comments were the model. Different students could comment different numbers of times on a given item. So the goal was to let you easily look at all of a student’s comments, and generate one grade.

Grading is separate for each comments section on the page. If you want comments on the main content page, you could add a new comments block for each week. If you want comments in each week on student comment items, that’s a  level of fine-grained grading I hadn’t envisioned. The only requests I have seen so far is actually to reduce grading, i.e. to automate a grade when a student submits a certain minimum number of grades.

> 
> 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?
This looks like a bug. I’m not seeing it in production or development. Please file a Jira giving steps to reproduce and the specific version of both Sakai and Lessons. There’s no problem adding grading when student pages exist. Adding grading doesn’t do anything to existing pages, so the code doesn’t care.

Lessons will create the gradebook entry. I actually have on my list allowing you to specify the name of the gradebook entry and use existing entries, but that’s not there now.

> 
> 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?

I’ve added confirmation when you delete a comments or student content section and it has student submissions. This is for the 10.0 version. It wouldn’t be hard to retrofit the patch to older versions.

> 
> ------- 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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