[Using Sakai] Assignment URLs in a lessons page?

Fri Jan 3 13:23:25 PST 2014

I was on our University-wide committee that voted to adopt Sakai as our 
CLS. The fact that it's open-source was a big attraction. But its 
architecture turned out to be very centralized, so that the most 
customization end-users can do is by inserting Java Scripts into HTML 
pages. Faculty members on the committee had also said that if we go with 
Sakai, the IT group should draw on faculty expertise to maintain and 
extend Sakai. (I've seen this work very well at Berkeley, Cornell, and 
MIT.) The IT people ignored this almost completely, so we must rely on 
an under-manned and under-educated (only 3 out of 100 people in our IT 
department have computer science degrees) IT staff. Some of them are 
very dedicated, but there's little chance these patches will be 
installed before they update Sakai to Version 10.

My take on all this is that outside of top schools (I've also spent 
considerable time at San Francisco State and Cleveland State), one is 
more likely to find IT departments resembling what one finds at a bank 
or law office. I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future. Two 
possible ways around this are: (a) instead of patches, make updates more 
automatic and mandatory, as happens with most desktop software these 
days; (b) make the architecture more decentralized (e.g., client-server) 
so that end-users have the flexibility to install & maintain extensions 
and plug-ins.

Otherwise, integrate the patches into the next version of Sakai, and the 
masses will just have to wait.

On 1/3/14 [Jan 3, 14] 12:39 PM, Trisha Gordon wrote:
> All,
>
> Our Sakai developer team at UVa (University of Virginia) has 
> contributed patches to the Sakai community for using the Resources 
> Browser in Sakai's CKeditor to link to Assignments, Forums, and Tests 
> & Quizzes (in addition to Resources). We also contributed patches to 
> handle the link migration from one site to another. These can all be 
> found in https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22283.
>
> I believe these contributions are slated for the Sakai 10 release.
>
> If you have questions, please let us know.
>
> Trisha Gordon
> University of Virginia UVaCollab (Sakai) User Support Manager
>
> On 1/3/14 3:22 PM, Marshall Feldman wrote:
>> Don't know what entity broker is. We used to have a feature in the CK 
>> Editor that allowed one to browse, find quizzes, etc., and insert the 
>> links into a document. This broke around Version 8 or 9 of Sakai.
>>
>>
>> On 1/2/14 [Jan 2, 14] 6:36 PM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
>>>
>>> Can you get a link to the assignment via entity broker?  I thought 
>>> there was a provider to give you direct links.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Steve
>>>
>>> sent from mobile
>>>
>>> On 01/01/2014 9:23 AM, "Marshall Feldman" <marsh at uri.edu 
>>> <mailto:marsh at uri.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I'm not sure if what I do is what you mean by "manually browsing
>>>     around," but here's the kludge I use. At the bottom of the
>>>     Lessons page
>>>     in question, I put an html block with a dashed line and text
>>>     saying to
>>>     ignore everything below here. Then under the line I put any
>>>     user-unfriendly Lessons blocks I need. Back above the line, I
>>>     compose my
>>>     HTML pages how I want them. When I need a link to the
>>>     user-unfriendly
>>>     stuff, I just right-click, copy the link, and put it in the nicely
>>>     formatted stuff above the line.
>>>
>>>     In some cases, I'm even able to hide a lessons page, insert all the
>>>     blocks on it that want, copy a URL, and then go to unhidden
>>>     pages and
>>>     insert the link wherever I need it.
>>>
>>>     Hope this helps. Even more, I hope Lessons fixes this obvious need.
>>>
>>>
>>>     On 12/30/13 [Dec 30, 13] 12:00 PM, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
>>>     > Assignment URLs in a lessons page?
>>>
>>>     Is there any way to have a single page Lessons block, and
>>>     include links to assignments in it?
>>>
>>>     Having to  have individual blocks for every item in every
>>>     assignment seems too piecemeal to me; and I typically have a
>>>     single document with a list of assignments, readings,
>>>     descriptions, etc.
>>>
>>>     I understand that if one wanted to have individual pages for
>>>     every lesson that might be also a reasonable structure, but I
>>>     prefer to have the entire wholeness of the flow in one place.
>>>
>>>     I can insert URLs for resources, but not for assignments
>>>     associated with a lesson that I can see.
>>>
>>>     I'd be happy to just have this as a html page under another tab
>>>     instead of Lessons, but fined the same problem, html (easily)
>>>     cannot link to assignments.
>>>
>>>     [Yes, I've seen before that I can manually browse around and
>>>     copy URLs of assignment pages as a fallback.]
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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