Top Five User Support Issues

End-User Support - Training, Tutorials, Documentation, & Consulting Members of the Sakai community are beginning a new initiative to share end-user support materials and also find & share ideas and resources for supporting Sakai end users, including faculty, staff, students, and others. All are encouraged to engage in dialogue about your-own end-user support experience, as well as your experience with this community peer sharing process. Click here to browse the catalog of shared materials.

Add your top five here. Please state your institution and whether you are in pilot or production. Wherever possible, please map to any requirements you have already submitted.
Georgia Institute of Technology
(Sakai 2.5)

• Assignments: adding assignment to gradebook and manually creating gradebook items are confusing; assignment added to gradebook can't be deleted, although it can be hidden from students.
• Forums: some instructors create a forum and assume students can start posting messages. They are not aware that it is invisible to students if a topic is not created under the forum.
• Emails: instructors can not set permissions on using Emails.
• Tests & Quizzes: releasing a quiz to particular students; question pools created by an instructor can't be accessed by another instructor.
• Modules: When a content section is edited, the content type can't be changed.

University of Twente
(we are in pilot with Sakai 2.2.0)
All details in the attachment.
1. Improvements of Schedule
a) My Workspace Schedule shows all events from all sites, but unfortunately the title of the site to which the event belongs is not shown in the overview 'Calendar by Month/Day/Year' (in List of Events and Printable view it is shown). You have to click on the event to see the site title. Solution: add the title of the site (maybe show a maximum number of characters and show entire title in tooltip).
b) When looking at the Schedule you really have to look for the name of the month or the week indication. See http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-2972.
c) You always have to scroll down to see the entire Schedule overview.
2. Consistency of procedures and texts (links, buttons). Consistency of procedures means that it's desirable that procedures like adding, revising and deleting an item are the same in each tool.
3. Improvements of Assignments (first 3 for teaching role, 4th for student role):
a) Better interface in 'Assignment List by Student'
b) The alterations of the Status text after grading is confusing (release/returned/graded/ungraded).
c) The difference between Save and Return (when grading an assignment) is not obvious for an instructor. See http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-414.
d) (is not in attachment) Submitting an assignment is not the same as finishing. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cms.sakai.devel/8194
4. More options for personal configuration of default behaviour of tools.
5. Improvements of Resources:
a) Difference between file name and title name is quite confusing for users. http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-6173.
b) Show indication that the content of a folder (not the folder itself) is changed since last view. http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-2269(is about Drop Box, but in fact same issue).
c) (is not featured in attachment) People want to upload a file, don't notice that there are 5 add buttons on
the main body of the page, but do see that there is a nice 'upload /download multiple resources' button in the menu bar. At which point they get a message about how to use WebDAv. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cms.sakai.devel/8093/focus=8108 (thankyou goes to Harriet Truscott)

Virginia Tech

1. The frame within a frame, each with their own set of scrollbars, is confusing and frustrating for many users.
2. The admin tools in Sakai are pretty sparse, which makes it hard to support. For example, you can't pull up all of the sites a user is part of, you have to 'Become a User' in order to access the sites that a user has access to. This poses security issues.
3. Lack of help/documentation for newer or provisional tools
4. Wiki is not easy to use. Most users do not want to "code"
5. Consistency in design throughout tools

University of Michigan
In Production (Sakai 2.2.x)

• Improve assignment submission workflow (includes notification of successfully submitted assignment & students' ability to edit/resubmit an assignment until the due date) - SAK-271, SAK-2077
• Group permission control and group creation using a provider id or by role
• Make all tools group aware
• Better integration between Assignments and Gradebook (for example, manually enter grades for assignments created in the Assignments tool)
• Easier way to make a single "syllabus" file publicly available
• Site by site preference control, including finer grained permissions on notifications per tool (so you could turn off notification for a role for a particular tool)
• Ability to Instant Message / Chat with users who appear in the "users online" window - SAK-816

University of California, Berkeley

• Discussion: The lack of an easy to use, full featured discussion board is one of the biggest barriers to getting instructors to use bSpace pedagogically instead of just administratively.
• Quiz & Survey: The Quiz & Survey tool is buggy, unreliable, and lacking key features such as data export and "true" surveys.
• Group Functionality: There is no elegant, intuitive, and simple way of setting up groups in bSpace for collaboration.
• Communication Between Tools: Tools do not communicate with each other to the extent that is expected by users. For example, Section Info does not affect all tools, and grades must be entered separately in Gradebook and Assignments.
• Usability: bSpace exhibits a clear lack of consistent wording and workflow across different tools. It also exhibits confusing wording (i.e. "Upload-Download Multiple Resources" button in Resources) and an unintuitive interface in many places (i.e. In the Syllabus tool, you must click "Create/Edit" and then "Add").
• Overall Sakai navigation/information architecture: Its easy to get lost in Sakai. There are several issues affeting this: 1) Lack of visual representation of the hiearchy (Sakai/Site/Tools/Intra tool navigation), 2) No breadcrumbs so if user is not at a top level page it's almost impossible to tell where you are, 3) Some tools save state and some don't. So when users leave a tool and then come back, sometimes they are taken back to where they left off and sometimes they are taken back to the to level page., 4) Top level links within are tool are used inconsistently. In some newer tools they are used as intra-tool navigation – they take users to all top level pages in a tool and are always available. In some older tools (and even newer ones) they do various things – in the roster tool they turn on and off columns, in the chat tool they set display options, in Melete they take action on items in the table below it.

University of California, Davis

• Assignments: Manually having to enter a grading item in gradebook first leads to confusion
• Removed email guest account at UCD since only kerberos provided id's are permitted
• Many students fail to hit submit button in Assignments and Quiz & Test so don't get graded
• Permission control differently all over the place is confusing: Some additional pre-built roles would help.
• Display of names in various places is confusing: sometimes it's the full name (e.g. chat) sometimes it's the id (assignments, gradebook). There may be some FERPA issues here as well...

University of Cambridge
These are the five non-Cambridge specific top requests that came through to our help desk in the first part of the Michaelmas term. They may not be much that Sakai can do about them, but I thought it was important to be honest about the top requests! We would generally agree with the issues raised by other Universities, but they aren't being raised by our users to the same extent as those given below.
We are running Sakai for the whole campus, following a two-year pilot, currently on 2.2.x

• Students / lecturers cannot request membership of a site (16%)
• People are confused by permissions, and some accidentally lock all students out of viewing content (16%)
• Inability to rename / and reorder tools (will be met by new renaming / reordering tool!) (7%)
• People find roles a confusing concept (5%)
• The online help does not always give real explanations of how to use the tool

University of Windsor
In Production (CLE 2.2)

• Improve Assignment Submission and Customizing!

Instructors should be the ones who decided how and what to grade. This should also include more fine grained permission than that currently available. Absolutely a must: Allow for all students to submit until their mouse button requires cleaning - All the way up to and including the due-date. Without this, it's almost penalizing early submitters as they do not have the ability to append, review, or even replace existing submissions even though nothing has been looked at yet by instructor's or TAs.

• All Course Site Tools need to be Group Aware and Group SMART.

This needs lots of work in the ability of admin roles to review / tweak where necessary. Major work needed in using Provider IDs and what it means AND what and how it should work thought a semester.
U of W needs major improvement in Group-Type work for all Course Site Sakai Tools. Basically, if it exists in a course site - U of W Instructors have dreamt up some absolutely awesome way to use this tool involving secure groups (one course sectioned off - secure and isolated work; only later to finally come together and COLLABORATE on what they have learned or what is left to learn). All of this should be more transparent for actually accomplishing these ideas into actual working models.

• We need two Resource Tools.

One for blanket student access. And one for instructors to decide how and when to share files. Draft / Archive / Author Only Modes for Instructor's are a must.

• Easier and less convoluted way to use Melete.

This is an awesome tool but is buried so deep in the number of clicks that many of my instructors avoid it. Four Major changes that we require are:
1. The ability to browse to the file that you wish to use when linking to a page in this site's content (without clipboard / notepad). Top of our list!
2. Set default open / close dates to well before and well after the current lesson.
3. Figure out a way to have instructors choose either PowerPoint / Word files and somehow perform some magic in the background so they will finally show up as a lesson (not a file to download).
4. Please add the option to turn off enumeration for lessons. It is not necessary and requires some instructors major head-aches when trying to figure out how to display content and not being able to change how it is displayed. Remove the restrictions in the default Module strings. Remove the restrictions in the content sections fields. Why does it matter if the name / description is one way or another. QTI-IMS packing can be adjusted easily when this type of resource is encountered.

• Sakai Pager Tool. Basically, in system PM. Allows system users to tap another on the shoulder and give / receive info on the spot. It also works great for times when the recipient isn't there to receive your words of wisdom.
• Somebody please allow for JForum to be configured in a much friendlier and usable interface. I haven't yet, nor do I foresee being able to explain to any instructor the complicated routine that must be followed in order to use secure group discussions. And above all: Absolutely only Admin roles should be granted ANY ability / permission that can affect other sites in the system.

University Fernando Pessoa
(production with Sakai 2.5)

1. Lack of a "student view" on most tools;
2. Lack of group" features, namelly the ability to easily create multiple groups (by selecting students, letting students choose groups, or randomly creating groups); note these are not "sections" but small groups for assignments, groupwork,...
3. and for some tools lack of group-aware features (assignments, test & quizes)
4. Student ids are shown differently from tool to tool; sometimes the id, and sometimes combinations of First Name, Last Name;
5. Date formats are not friendly (just because they are US-centric), AM-PM (0 or 12?) is confusing most of the time; some tools still do not allow full translation
6. There's not a way of contacting someone visible in the "presence" list (something like 'invite to chat')

Unisa - University of South Africa
(Sakai 2.5)
*Test and Quizzes:I would like to see an expansion on the question types. Allow for drag and drop ability. Example: A picture with labels on the side, the student clicks and drags the answer to the hotspot. Another similar use is Click on the XYZ item on the picture.
*Test and Quizzes:Matching item needs additional distracters in the column of distracters.
*Test and Quizzes:In matching type questions one would like students to click on the item in column A and then click the correct distracter in column B. Visually it will be easier to comprehend and execution will also be easier than the current methods. I saw a system once that connect the items with lines that is drawn between the two items once they are selected.
*Mathematical Fonts Ability:Default mathematical font ability in all tools (Announcements, Blogs, Wikis, Self assessment....).
*PersonalizationIt will be great if a user is addressed by his/her own name. Example. Hi (Name) welcome to the course site for (course code).

University of Virginia
Sakai 2.5.0

1. Site wide Student view (http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-7924).
2. Allow multiple revisions for Assignment submissions (http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-14746).
3. Ability to customize home page layout.
4. Improved participant management: for example, ability to import/export csv list of participants IDs, "select all" participants option to remove/inactivate, hooks into other directory services (e.g, LDAP).
5. Ability to have a different grading scale per Student (http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-14428).

Mount Holyoke College
(Sakai 2.5)

1. More explicit error messages for users, especially notification of exceeding character limits on tools such as Profile rather than silent failure. (might be mitigated by simple notice of character limits).
2. More reliable WebDAV client.
3. True WYSIWYG editor for the wiki tool.
4. Better usability for designing quizzes and more question types available.
5. More flexible Gradebook, allowing for mixed mode grading.