ADVICE from Sakai Community: Create Own Course Sites
September 2011
What common problems have instructors (or support staff) encountered?
We've had instructors creating their own sites for as long as we've been in Sakai, at least since 2005. We also let *anyone* on campus create a site-- staff and students too. At first, a common support issue was that students who were trying to request access their course sites were confused enough to try to create an official course site.
We probably saw that more at first because students were more anxious to find their course sites than instructors were about creating them. Students wanted the sites before the instructors created them, or, at least before they published them.
This hasn't been a significant problem in the last four years. Instructors start earlier and students are more trusting that the course site will appear for them as soon as the instructor wants them to see it. Still, because instructors have very different ideas about when to publish their sites, we still get some significant support traffic of this variety: "Hi, I went to CTools and I only see two course sites. Where are the rest of them?"
We do a number of Setting Up Your Course Site workshops the week or two before the fall term and always have special sessions available each fall for new Faculty. Often, the biggest challenges come with new faculty whose site setup experience is compounded by the likelihood that the Reg Office doesn't yet have them officially assigned to their sections.
Another perennial challenge involves instructors who want to start setting up their sites far far in advance. If the Reg Office doesn't have their feed available for us yet, and if that feed isn't stable because the department is still changing appointments, then Instructors will see no rosters to attach or perhaps see the wrong ones (or the right ones now but ones that they will eventually not teach). The workflow prompts them to "Request" the rosters that aren't yet available to them. Those are free-entry fields (Subject code, course, and section) and instructors are probably batting about .600 as far as reporting the right codes.
That said, most instructors don't start too soon so never get to mis-report their assignments. But, at scale, the ones that do self-report probably constitute a good percent of the support traffic at certain times of the year.
We've always let our faculty (and staff and students) create their own
Sakai sites. We provide training sessions and documentation (https://sakai.rutgers.edu/portal/help/main), but still get a lot of questions at the start of the semester. Most of the questions revolve around linking course rosters to sites (most departments let faculty do it, a few don't) and adding people to sites.
Our user guide for Creating Course Sites will give an idea of how we changed the site creation workflow from the UI perspective. If you’re interested in our code for this, we’ll be happy to share it with you.
https://collab.itc.virginia.edu/access/content/group/ac005a57-c82f-48b8-0075-aae7c8407ca8/User%20Guides/coursequickstart_createSite.pdf
We’re pretty happy with this process and have no complaints.
Did your institution develop any special customizations to modify the site creation workflow?
Almost certainly, but I'm not a developer. I know that anyone who tries to create a new site will only be able to attach the rosters for classes where the Registrar has them listed as an official instructor.
We've also created some templates to make site creation a bit easier.
This is our first semester with them, so we don't know how much they're
being used.
The templates we've created are:
Basic Course Template
This template contains all of the essential tools to supplement a
physical course. It has tools for holding discussions, assigning
homework, distributing syllabi and course materials, and grading.
Tools: Syllabus, Announcements, Resources, Assignments, Chat Room,
Discussion & Private Messages, Gradebook 2
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Online Course Template
This template contains all of the essential tools for holding an online
course. It has tools for holding discussions, administering quizzes and
assignments, building structured lessons, distributing course materials,
and grading.
Tools: Syllabus, Announcements, Resources, Chat Room, Discussion &
Private Messages, Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Lesson Builder,
Gradebook 2, Wiki
----
Committee Template
This template contains all of the essential tools for a committee
project site. It has tools for mass-mailing, distributing documents and
resources, and collaborating on a wiki.
Tools: Announcements, Resources, Wiki, Email Archive, Mailtool
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Basic Project Template
This template contains all of the essential tools for managing a simple
project. It has tools for holding discussions, exchanging resources, and
collaborating on a wiki.
Tools: Announcements, Resources, Chat Room, Wiki, Discussion & Private
Messages
----
Research Project Template
This template contains all of the essential tools for managing a simple
research project. It has tools for holding discussions, exchanging
resources, and collaborating on a wiki.
Tools: Announcements, Resources, Chat Room, Wiki, Discussion & Private
Messages, Library Intro, Library Research
If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently?
We are so decentralized here that there would be no way to mandate or even strongly suggest that instructors create and publish sites on any institutional timeline. Over the years, various programs, schools and colleges (departments in the largest schools) have bubbled up their own expectations about if and when their instructors publish sites. It might have been nice to have the resources to facilitate those local conversations a little earlier in the process. Maybe they *had to* figure that out for themselves, but it would have been easier on support if they had.