...
- Authoring: the process of creating assessments within the Samigo tool
- Delivery: the process of administering an assessment to a group of students or other users
- Reports: collecting statistics on the assessments
- Importing/Exporting: the effort to draw existing assessments into Sakai, and to output them in some format that other systems will be able to use
| Note | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
Authoring
The authoring tool is already quite flexible. Authoring an assessment in Samigo is relatively straightforward. When the instructor opens the tool, s/he is presented with this screen:
In addition to providing instructors with the ability to build assessments of the six built-in types: Formative Assessment, Problem Set, Quiz, Survey, Test, and Timed Test, it the authoring tool also allows for these types themselves to be fairly extensively customized, and for new assessment types to be created. The . Of course, there is still plenty of functionality that could be added – and most of the effort out there in the community seems to be either fixing bugs with or adding new functionality in this space.
Currently, the instructor can control, for example, how many times an assessment can be submitted, whether late submissions will be accepted, whether to provide the user with feedback after an answer is submitted, and even whether the program should only accept submissions only from specific IP addresses. It's also possible to break up an assessment into discrete sections and to control how questions are presented to the user – i.e. one per page or in batches.
Unfortunately, the user interface itself is not neither exactly intuitive or streamlined. For example, in order to 'publish' an assessment – a necessary step if you want anyone to be able to use it – it's necessary to click on 'Settings' before you can find or select the 'Publish' button.
Also, the process of creating an assessment requires each question to be entered one-at-a-time and on its own screen. This means that there's no easy way for an instructor to simply copy and paste a list of questions that she's written up in a word processor. Of course, there is still plenty of functionality that could be added to the authoring tool – and most of the effort out there in the community seems to be either fixing bugs with the existing authoring or adding new functionality, as you can see below.
Tasks/Feature Requests
- There's some interest in sharing assessment types so they could be modified on a departmental basis, for example SAK-5199 and SAK-3526
- Request for more flexibility to accommodate students with special needs - allow instructor to adjust time available on a student-by-student basis SAK-3427
...