[samigo-team] Samigo-Schedule integration--due date to display by default?

Wed Aug 17 10:14:19 PDT 2011

I've been loosely following this conversation, but noticed that this
has been committed into trunk the other day.  Is there a consensus on
the changes/modifications?  Will these changes be part of another
jira?  Just curious since I contributed the patch.

-Bryan

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 5:13 PM, Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu> wrote:
> Hello Verity,
> Nice to meet you. Regarding the second thing you mention, yes, I have inquired with the developer what happens if the Schedule tool is not in the site (and hopefully we'll get the patch installed locally today so I can check this out too)--we would definitely not make it default if bad things would happened. (I'll probably do is summarize and transfer notes from my private discussion to JIRA, so it can be followed https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAM-1121)
>
> Regarding the first thing, if you are talking about practice quizzes, I assume those don't have a due date, so it's a non-issue. But if you are talking about homework with none/minimal grading, this is also primarily what T&Q is used for at Stanford (only our med school uses it for high stakes testing). I actually think that the primary user story for this enhancement is as a reminder for low-stakes quizzing and homework; if it's a high stakes exam, chances are students have already added it to their personal calendar to block out the time.
>
> This enhancement will be especially  useful if these entries include direct links from the Calendar to the quiz itself (Longsight may add that if they have time and if not, I hope we can do this for 2.10). That way students could just log in, see what they have to do, and do it directly from that page, instead of visiting half a dozen course sites. This makes the situation different than readings in Assignments, though it could be argued that, clutter or not, having those appear in the schedule would be useful as well.
>
> As I think I've mentioned on a separate branch of this thread, what users really need is a synoptic "to do view" of all assignments. I had thought Assignments had this already and we would follow suit but I think I was thinking of their integration with the schedule. Perhaps this "to do view" is actually just a view of the calendar, to both optimize space and work that has been done. If so, it would be good if users could filter events by priority (high/medium/low) or type of event (exam/quiz/web activity), not just see them as different colors. I will add both of these to JIRA.
>
> I will point out my bias--when we did user research into learning activities in advance of the OAE, a key student need was to have a view of all the things they needed to do--they end up having to do a lot of work just to find out what they have to do next. In fact, it's such a need that there is a startup being incubated here that intends to let students crowdsource entry of their courses' schedules, because their instructors don't do it. Right now, Schedule hardly gets used, at least on this campus, except by professors who have dedicated staff to enter this information by hand.
>
> So I may take heat for this, but I think the purpose of this integration is to make the Schedule than it currently is by making it easier to populate it.  It should be up to the student to ignore the info or not--better for them to have the information then let them sort through it. Of course, the Schedule tool does not currently make such sorting easy but if we can properly categorize the events and allow Schedule to filter for this, that would go a long way.
>
> Keli Amann
> User Experience Specialist
> Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Verity Allan" <vla22 at cam.ac.uk>
> To: samigo-team at collab.sakaiproject.org
> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 5:15:18 AM
> Subject: Re: [samigo-team] Samigo-Schedule integration--due date to display by default?
>
> Hi,
>
> I can think of a couple of scenarios in which you might not want the due
> date of a Samigo test to display by default - one's user-oriented, the
> other's possibly more technical:
>
> 1) At our institution, Samigo assessments are primarily used for formative
> assessments, and aren't high stakes testing. Adding the due dates for
> these to the calendar might risk the cluttering effect you mention for
> Assignments. (This probably also goes for other institutions which may do
> a mix of high-stakes and informal testing with Samigo.)
>
> 2) Would there be any nasty behaviour if the Calendar/Schedule tool wasn't
> in the site? E.g. the box is ticked by default, but that Samigo throws a
> horrible error because it can't find the schedule tool to add a due date
> to it? (Hopefully the developers can sort this one out!)
>
> But generally, this is a good feature to add to Samigo, making it more in
> line with Assignments, as I'm pretty sure students want to know when
> important tests are happening.
>
> Regards,
> Verity
> CARET
> University of Cambridge
>
>> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:37:30 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu>
>> Subject: [samigo-team] Samigo-Schedule integration--due date to
>>       display by      default?
>> To: samigo-team at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> Message-ID:
>>       <1991576665.1149562.1313087850818.JavaMail.root at zm07.stanford.edu>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>>
>> Hello to the new community Samigo team,
>> I'm reviewing Longsight's welcome contribution of a schedule integration (https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAM-1121). In short, the settings for available, due, and retract dates will have checkboxes that allow these dates to appear in the Schedule.
>>
>> I'm making suggestions to the developer in the hopes that they might be implemented before 2.9. My question to you all is whether the due date checkbox should be checked by default. It seems that if one were to bother to set a due date for a quiz or test, that this would naturally be something one would want on the calendar now that the integration is available, so why not save them the click? I can't think of even an edge case as to why this shouldn't be displayed (and if there were an edge case, they could certainly uncheck it).
>>
>> The only thing that gives me pause is that Assignments does require an active click on a checkbox to add an assignment to the calendar. However, I think that because Assignments also includes everyday readings, and you might not want to clutter the Calendar with things like that, just major graded assignments that have to be turned in.
>>
>> The answer is pretty clear to me but since we have this list now, what do people think? Am I overlooking something, either from a user perspective or a performance perspective, that would lead us to require user to opt-in, rather than opt-out? Please respond by Monday.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Keli Amann
>> User Experience Specialist
>> Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
>>
>>
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