UBC Arts ISIT Blog

I finally had more time to look into Sakai's assessment tools. What a disappointment to Samigo's tests and quizzes! I think I'm use to using WebCT's online assessment tool, therefore, I expect Samigo to have the same features. Here's a list of what Samigo lacks:

1) You cannot delete assessments once it has been published. It says you can retract the release date so students will not see it in their view, however, I'm sure instructors would want to permanently remove them if they don't ever want to see it again. It makes sense to delete them.

2) You cannot share your question pool with other instructors. In WebCT, there is an import and export button to do this.

3) In the designer/instructor interface in Sakai, there is not button to reset the students marks to have them retake the assessment. If a quiz needs to be reset, you have to run an SQL statement which would require the instructor to contact the back-end IT guy to do this everytime.

Sakai's tests and quizzes tool is pretty frustrating. I hope they make improvements in the future. For the time being...I give my brownie points to WebCT.

With collaboration with Faculty of Land & Food Systems, we updated to Sakai 2.3.1 on Feb.21'07 . I noticed one change in the Wiki. On the Wiki page, you can now comment! One of my pilots asked me a few months ago if it was possible and my response was that commenting wasn't really meant for Wiki's but it was something that Blogs do. Interesting enough, Sakai's wiki allows commenting. I was excited initially but I see a downside because you CAN'T DELETE comments. If a student uses inappropriate language, you can edit the comment which is good, however, what if I mistakenly commented on a page that I wasn't suppose to comment on? What if an instructor simply wants to re-use the course again? It may be simpler to remove certain items and delete comments rather than creating a new project site and re-use material from other sites you own. I even tried under "history" to revert back to the older version and that does not delete the comments =(

I did some more tests with the Podcast today. I noticed I can upload any time of file format. I've uploaded various media/audio files as well text/pdf files and it all works. It seems like the feature works just like the "resources" section where the instructor can upload any file formats they want. There is an RSS feed but so far when I tried to add it to my Bloglines feeder, it failed. I haven't figured out what the problem is but it's telling me the RSS feed doesn't exist.

I was also looking into the Blog tool in Sakai hoping to test the RSS feed. To my surprise, there is no feed for it. I'm SHOCKED...DEVASTATED!!! Gee-wiz, I really HOPE the RSS feed gets added to the Blog tool in Sakai because so far I really like using it.

I was testing out CogLab today to see how the program worked and how stimulating it is. I quickly learned that the CogLab experiments have very limited graphics (non existent actually) and are basically a black screen with some white letters or numbers. CogLab is an application that provides cognitive pychology students an opportunity to take experiments that are very similar to those taken in clinical settings. It's a great way to give students a hands-on feel of cognitive psychology. However, the tasks in the experiments are very repetitive and not very stimulating although they do provide results at the end that can be informative. I wonder if there are other applications available (free or not) that provide experiments on concepts such as attention, perception, sensory memory, neurocognition, etc that may be more visually stimulating to students. Maybe with some graphics, some colour, some animations?

I came across a new free WebDav tool for Mac users today. It is called Goliath. The current version is 1.0.1 and it is compatible with Mac OS X 10.0.4 or higher.

It makes uploading or downloading multiple files from a webserver much easier. For example, when an instructor is using WebCT or Sakai as their learning management system (note the term content management system is more often called learning management system now) and require to upload multiple files at once, Goliath allows them to do so. It's simple to use and does the job pretty fast.

If you are looking for a Webdav application, I would suggest trying out Goliath.

Yesterday I received a phone call from one our Sakai pilot users Cathryn Robertson from the department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing. She started using Sakai in September 2006. She's given us some positive reviews on Sakai and says her students are really enjoying it. She uses Plone at SFU, WebCT CE 4.1 and Sakai here at UBC. She's told me WebCT My-Files is a messy way to organize files. Tonnes of files can be up there and stored for who knows how long. Instructors tend to upload materials, add it to their course modules and when it's time to upload the newest version, old files aren't overwritten. As you can see, this is how files get piled onto the server and that's how we get into the problem of server space. In our institution, we constantly run out of server space. Emails are sent out to instructors at the end of the term to remind them to clear out their old materials and delete old backups. I can say for Faculty of Arts, only 10% of our instructors do their spring cleaning. However with Sakai, there's no "my-files" area so you don't run into any of the problems.

Cathryn also mentioned she's shown Sakai to a instructor from Faculty of Medicine. The guy has never seen Sakai and his initial feedback was that he was really impressed with how easy it is to use. I think this has been a great launch thus far with Sakai. Lets continue to have feedbacks coming in and feel free to comment in our blogs too.