Five Minute Fixes to Improve Sakai Course Design

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Thomas Boudrot - Oregon Health & Science University
Thomas Boudrot is the Manager of Academic Technology at Oregon Health & Science University. His team provides instructional design and technical support to three schools and numerous departments in the use of Sakai. He has an EdD in educational administration from the University of Southern Mississippi.

John Ansorge - Oregon Health & Science University
John Ansorge is an Instructional Technologist at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. He provides user and technical support for Sakai and other online academic technology services. He has a Masters degree in educational technology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract:
Support calls from students and instructors are an extremely important source of information. By analyzing help desk issues, a course builder will often discover that design, not the technology, is the culprit. Using support call details, course developers can revise courses and develop best practices to prevent further support calls. Spending just a few minutes improving a course at the beginning of the term can save hours of user frustration and confusion. Many good design techniques are basic though new course builders are likely to miss them. A few of them include:

• Building the course homepage to direct students to important features and “must-do’s” when they first enter the site
• Ensuring that the site has a voice of its instructors
• Building (and deploying in Melete or Resources) templates that standardize the look and feel of instructional material
• Standardizing on uploaded media types to prevent the need for multiple media players and to minimize end-user access issues.

In this session, the presenters will share lessons learned from two years of help desk experience that has resulted in course design changes yielding significantly fewer support calls. Actual courses from a variety of subjects and levels will be shared. Time will be reserved for questions and answers.

Notes:

Look at your support tickets and see where people are having problems.

Things to do:

• Make sure there is something on the home page of the course that tells the students where they are.
• Link to the syllabus in the side-bar (we do this already).
• Set link target with tools to "top".
• Put a "Getting Started" section in the homepage that links to the syllabus.
• Make sure that the students get an email or message every week (creates a voice for the course) or put in a video or recording.
• Get rid of all unused buttons. Use the "Page Order" in the "Site Editor" (Site Info).
• End the scavenger hunt. Use icons and links in the "Lessons" tool. Provide a template. Look at the "Templates" button.
• Standardize all file types for things like videos (they are using Flash, mp3, and pdf)
• Have faculty use the Text Editor as often as possible instead of uploading and linking documents

Things to Avoid:

• Do not use date specific assignments - make the tests due on specific weekdays.
• Because you can't link to every area in Sakai (don't link), give them a consistent path (Tests & Quizzes > Week 03 Quiz).
• Stop using the calendar - not every instructor uses it, students don't know to expand the calendar. It sets the students up for failure.

Longer than 5 minute fixes:

rSmart got Lessons Tool and Resources talking together. You used to not be able to do this in Melete. This allows the links to be able to be moved. All the links revised automatically.

Adding templates - have rSmart change the editor to include templates.

CSS for Ergonomics - Skin manager allows you to make changes to make managing groups much easier. This is fixed in 2.7

How Sakai Solved the Multi-Section Problem for Romance Languages

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Rob Moore - UNC-Chapel Hill Dept of Romance Languages
Rob Moore is a 2004 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and has worked at UNC for almost six years. He is entering his fourth year as Manager of the Foreign Language Resource Center in the Department of Romance Languages. In this position, Rob collaborates with instructors and other departments on projects to improve the quality of language teaching as well as integrates innovative technology into the language curriculum. Recent completely projects have included
http://www.unc.edu/languageplacement and http://flrcvideos.unc.edu.

Abstract:
Department of Romance Languages has several large section courses, which can have as many as 45 sections taught by multiple instructors with one course coordinator. The course coordinator provides syllabi, assignments, and tests for the sections. Using Sakai’s section aware tools, these courses were moved from Blackboard to Sakai, which significantly improved communication and coordination between coordinators and instructors. The move to Sakai has not only saved time but also significantly improved communication and coordination between the coordinator and the instructors. Starting in the fall of 2009, each of the large section classes for French and Spanish had one main Sakai site, with the course coordinator designated as the instructor. Students were enrolled in sections within this main course, and instructors were set as teaching assistants for their section. The course coordinator can post necessary information to this one site and all students are able to see it, which eliminates the need for the coordinator to manage multiple sites and instructors having to move items from external locations to Blackboard. Another advantage of Sakai is that it segments students enrolled in the sections so that when they log in, they see only classmates from their section. As a result, any assignments or discussion boards are available to a specific section, and they are graded and seen only by that section’s instructor.

Notes:

This works well for large multisection courses but it is hard to run the gradebook. If one instructor changes all the grade weighting, there can be a disaster. I am wondering if Gradebook 2 won't fix this.

We should look at the sections tool for our nursing classes.

Students do not see other students in the different sections. All of the tools are section aware.

How Sakai solved the multi-section problem for Romance Languages

View more presentations from Rob Moore.

Instructor Driven Course Site Design

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Yitna Firdyiwek is Faculty Consultant in Instructional Technology at the University of Virginia.

Abstract:
Sakai is now in full production at the University of Virginia where its adoption rate has been steadily growing over the last two and a half years. However, in spite of its many useful features, one of Sakai's serious shortcomings has been its limited accommodations for variety and flexibility in truly representing and delivering a course's design. While Sakai allows instructors to select, rename, and reorder tools and resources, instructors cannot provide students access to tools and resources except through a linear and heavily tool-based menu structure. Instructors at our institution have made it clear to us that this limitation is a severe setback to their creative and effective use of the system, especially in purely online environments. They may, for example, want to organize their course content and activities in a chronological order, or by topic modules, or even as a narrative with an emergent design. But, by default, Sakai forces a tool-based view/presentation even though few (if any!) courses are designed that way. This limitation has been partially addressed by at least two projects -- Melete by Etudes and OpenSyllabus by HECl. In this presentation we will briefly discuss the approaches and limitations in these two efforts and describe a third approach that focuses on the built-in editor in Sakai (FCKEditor) which we have adapted to provide a simple and flexible way for instructors to deliver their course designs via Sakai. By extending the Sakai editor with easy-to-use templates and plug-ins for full screen editing and previewing, and by adding the ability to easily link to discussion topics, assignments, and tests (in addition to resources), we have been able to provide instructors with an environment that is simple but also capable of supporting their individualized and innovative course designs.

There are groups on campus that provide information, suggestions, and decisions from faculty that drive technology:

• CMS Advisors
• Shanti/UVACSE
• TRC - teaching and learning support
• Instructional development teams in the different schools

When they collect information from users, they find that after a year, instructors are more comfortable using Sakai. They have forgotten the other LMS. They are only really using a few tools - communications, syllabus, and resources.

Student/faculty perspectives are not aligned. The students are comfortable and the faculty are not organized. Faculty complain about the tools but not willing to get the training to use the tools effectively.

There are requests from faculty for "content driven" course design - an agenda based course. This is contrasted with a "tool driven" approach. This way, the content is owned by the instructor - the instructor owns that space.

The steps that they took were:

• Focus on supporting instructors
• Give instructors control over the interface
• Provide design assistance with templates
• Focus on online editor training for instructors

They use an "interactive syllabus" - a template that allows instructors to link all of the activities to the syllabus.

They use the template icon in their syllabus editor with pre-loaded syllabi templates that they have created.

They are working on preserving the links - the syllabus is not copyable to the next course or semester because the links are dependent on the original course. They cannot afford new tools and support. He is looking at linking everything to a development site.

Another instructor here is using the "Schedule" tool in Sakai.

The syllabus becomes a teaching tool rather than just a contract.

This represents an elegant solution because it uses the editor that is built into Sakai.