Problem
Users create content and activities in Sakai meant for other users as the audience and/or participants. Naturally, users would like to "see what the audience sees / experience what the participants experience" as they are in the creation process. This kind of direct feedback where the user sees what they are creating as they are creating it is very good design. However, it's pretty tricky to do well without being invasive of the activity the user is trying to complete (e.x. stop their current mindset of creating the assignment to figure out how to see what it looks like). Currently there is not easy way to experience what the audience will experience. Some users have cleverly created work-arounds by using a spare email address to create a second account for themselves that simulates what others see. There are numerous difficulties with this approach like getting the permissions right, etc. which shouldn't be left to the user to do.
Goals
- "See what student's see"
- Allow users to preview their content while creating it
- Allow users to see and/or experience their creation (content, activity, etc.) as another type of user (e.g. doublecheck afterwards)
Scenarios
Setting up a site
Sara, the instructor, is setting up her course site for the semester. As she fills out some of the basic information about her site (description, etc.) it is unclear how these bits of information will show up in her site. Who will see it and where, she wonders. Will it look just like it does when I type it into the input box or will it have some other formatting?
Creating an assignment
Sara, the instructor, is creating an assignment for her students to complete in a couple weeks. She's getting started on it now while she has some spare time but she doesn't want students to get the assignments until they cover the topic next week in class. The assignment requires students to attach to a short paper and she's heard complaints in the past about the difficulty students have had adding an attachment. In fact, last term, several students used the system as the excuse to turn assignments in late. She wonders if there's something she can do to make this process easier for students. It's unclear to Sara what to do since she doesn't understand their experience in the site. In the back of her mind, she's also cognizant that her course site is a representation of her as an instructor as she wonders if the assignment will look and if it will be available to students at the appropriate time (is she doing all the right things?).
Observation: Rutgers users don't feel this aspect is in too bad of a shape – Assignments preview people are happy with, Tests & Quizzes is getting better, but not quite there yet, other tools it's less clear.
Creating a Syllabus
Scenario description goes here...
Check that _________ can see __________
How does "a student" see this site/tool. Most of our instructors don't really appreciate the complexities of Authz interaction anyway – so I'll leave it at that broadly defined level. A close corollary is: how does "a particular student see this assignment/resource/feedback/thing" The sad reality (at Rutgers at least) is that our faculty often end up in the "I don't see it" user-support role and being the helpful souls they are would like to be able to help.
The helpdesk as well (with user permission?) could greatly benefit from being able to easily view a user's data. For user support our admins can use SU – it would be nice to have a "sub-SU" which could give the helpdesks some kind of "read-only" (more ambiguity) view of an account's access. Also particularly useful in the case where you've contracted with an outside vendor or group for support.
Observation: we get a reasonable number of "I changed myself to a student in Site Info please set me back" requests to suggest that in our instructors exploration this is the area that they expect to be able to manipulate this kind of setting.
Observation: Many instructors at Rutgers have actually made comments along the lines of asking for something like a sandboxed SU tool that allowed instructors to switch to people in their site. (Of course IT would like if it did appropriate logging & audit trail to prevent forgery)
Seeing at a glance what's going to who
Finer-grained indication from the instructor view over the release of an item/resource/test/etc. Perhaps some kind of UI pattern on indicating "partical-release" for things available to particular sections, groups, etc.
Observation: Sakai tends towards a "filtered" model of presenting information. Many of our users are not entirely comfortable with that conceptual model – a lot of them have expressed they expect something more navigational – e.g. go to the student section, go to the instructor section and they don't have context on why they can see some things, and what others can see.
Requirements
- I know this is somewhat different from the problem description but we need somewhere to capture these