One of the most exciting things about technology is the newness of it, but it's also often the most daunting at the same time.
In this case, I'm speaking directly of Sakai, the new LMS that Johnson is using to replace Blackboard later on this year, and is currently being used for some courses this semester, including Introduction to Educational Technology.
Playing with or opening up a new technology is like getting that brand new bike at Christmas time. You see the box, it's big and it's wrapped in this great looking paper with all the speckles and fancy ribbon on it, with a ginormous bow on top of it. You think "I know what that is, and I'm so excited!" So you open it with bubbling excitement, only to be stopped by the picture of what's inside of the box - a brand new, ruby-red, white-walled, 10 speed with cruise control, or something like that. All of the exitement quickly dies down when you actually open the box and discover...... it still has to be put together.
Now don't get me wrong. Sakai is 'put together', in fact it's put together rather well, and by a team of very dedicated and education-minded folk. And it offers some fantastic advantages over Blackboard, not to mention the cost savings. There are a tonne of tools available within any course or site (as they reference it), and a wealth of granularity available to professors and students alike. But one of the most significant issues and often one of the most critical pieces of an LMS is the gradebook.
Sakai does include a gradebook tool, but there are some given limitations. The gradebook can be setup in one of two overall ways - as a percentage based gradebook or a points-based gradebook. This is great, because on of the other tedius tasks in grading is the computation of a final grade, and reading into a standard paper/pencil gradebook can often yield unexpected grades, just because of computational error or mis-reading lines. Sakai's gradebook takes care of this - to a point. The standard gradebook is also where I typically handle attendance and other assignments. The problem with the Sakai gradebook tool is that anything entered into the gradebook MUST have a corresponding point value - including attendance.
There's also an assignments tool in Sakai - which is great because I can create all of and have students submit all their assignments right inside of Sakai - even to where I get a notification for each assignment that each student submits. I can even make comments on submitted assignments and give it back to them for resubmission. And all of this can be integrated into the Gradebook - how great is that? The only snag is that assignments that are integrated into the gradebook MUST have a point value assigned to them.
Really as I've thought about it, it's not so much a limitation of Sakai, as much as it's just a limitation of a computational tool. In order to have a gradebook automatically calculate a grade, it must be able to so based on a set of pre-configured parameters, and when it comes down to it, points is the only way to make an equivalence for any other grade type. 9 points out of 10 points, really comes down to a 90%, which in most cases is a low A. A pass or fail grade could be representated by a one (1) or a zero (0). Attendence could be represented by a 3 point scale, 2 = present, 1 = tardy, 0 = absent. Ideally for a 16 week course that meets once a week, a perfect attendence point value would be 32. So this works pretty well.
I'm sure that the gradebook tool will become more robust in the coming years, and I understand that there's some potential for an actual attendence tool in the works.
I'll keep my eyes peeled.
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