[sakai2-tcc] [Building Sakai] Assignments Shows Wrong Submission For Student

[Matthew Jones]

I personally think it's time to put a stronger effort into deprecating
Assignments and getting Assignments 2 into core. These two tools being so
similar are more difficult to describe the differences to clients over
tools like Gradebook/Gradebook 2 or Mneme/Samigo.

This was discussed at last summers conference though very little effort has
been put into any of it in the last 9 months. My feeling, looking at the
commits, is that Michigan is putting less effort into supporting
Assignments (mostly community contribution lately) while IU (mostly via
Michelle) is still committed to Assignment 2.

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/WGASSIGN/WG%3A+Assignments

There is a lot of work on both sides I think, state just being a more
obvious one. (Though every velocity tool that hasn't implemented SAK-20834
should have similar problems right?)

To fix the major issues in Assignment that Assignment 2 addresses would
require

   - Eliminating all of the reliance on server side state
   - Fixing the data model so there is no XML and performance is good in
   sites with large enrollment. Possibly a creative fix to better process the
   XML could be achieved rather than breaking up the data.
   - Adding versioned submissions like A2 (nice, but probably optional
   after the other 2)

These last 2 issues would save us (and many other schools) a lot of time on
data recovery when entries are wiped out, either because of an error with
state overwriting with incorrect data or because of a user error hitting
the delete button. They're also pretty nice features. The No-SQL XML data
structure of Sakai was a good idea but with the lack of easily addable
indexes and slow readers doesn't work very great in practice.

I'm not sure yet what it would take to close the gap between A2 and A1
since nobody has done that analysis in the last 2 years. I'm sure there are
a few significant features added to A1 recently that would be desired in
A2, though probably nothing major? Possibly likely less work than those big
3 tasks though I don't know yet.

Longsight could put some time into this if the TCC and community think it's
a good idea, ideally prior to 2.10. There should be a decision one way or
another though.

Some questions I guess.

   - Is Michigan still providing support for A1 or is it (like nearly every
   other tool) being dropped onto the CLE Team? The default assignee is "Umich
   Developers" and many are assigned as such but some tickets are being
   reassigned to CLE Team or others. (This doesn't matter to me either way,
   just if Michigan isn't exclusively supporting this as in the past it makes
   more of a case for replacement)
   - Is IU or anyone else other than Longsight still interested in working
   on getting A2 into core? Either technical (development/UI work) or
   non-technical (gap analysis/filing issues) help would be useful.

There were nearly 25 people in the session at the last conference, and I
was reluctant to hold another similar one because of the lack of progress
or anything new to report.



On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:

>
> On Mar 5, 2013, at 11:52 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
>
> I reported this ticket a few days ago, sounds similar:
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-23247 (When grading students, if
> you press the back button, some of the form is incorrect)
>
> I spent about an hour looking at the code and couldn't see where this was
> happening. We were just going to add a lock on the back button to avoid it
> being used as that was the only way I could reproduce this. It's got to be
> something with the state and context not being in sync.
>
>
> Is it time to bite the bullet and take this stuff out of state in
> Assignments???
>
> /Chuck
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai2-tcc/attachments/20130305/ad979cde/attachment.html