Sakai VetMed Technical Meeting
Sakai Gradebook to UCD Final Grade Submission Demo
Brian Donnelly demoed the proposed Sakai gradebook export to final grade submission for proof of concept. He demoed how a sakai gradebook with partial grades assigned can be exported using the Export CSV button.
This function on dev was modified to be UCDavis-specific, exporting fields including: Site Title, Course Site, Course Provider ID, Student Name, Student ID (Kerberos ID), and Course Grade.
He then imported the file to the Final Grade Submission (fgs) dev site to demonstrate ease of use. The file uploaded successfully, showing grades for the students graded in Sakai and the fgs error messages for ungraded students.
He explained that there are two types of error messages possible on a successful import:
- standard notice for students where no grade is submitted, and
- issues with gradining based on student level, e.g., where pass/non-pass is indicated differently for a grad student vs an undergrad. FGS grading error message points out where an incorrect grade type is entered and shows the selections possible for that student.
The current upload process checks and matches for the correct number of fields, and will work whether the spreadsheet is coming from sakai or myucdavis. There is some brittleness to the unpload in that faculty must not change/rearrange columns and errors may arise from additional tabs or spreadsheet entries beyond the last row.
The current sakai Export CSV file has an excess of fields and a long, ugly file name. Some fields will be removed, SID (instead of Kerberos) will be added, and the file name changed to reflect more faculty-friendly information while continuing to be functional.
A future version may include using IMS standards and web services to submit grades to UCD FGS rather than an Excel file.
There is a Kick-Off meeting in about 2 weeks to demo/review this process.
Evaluations
Phil - Next week, will demo authoring pages of evaluations (i.e., editable evaluation creation fields)
Training/Support
Dave - Training sessions with a limit of 4-6 faculty per session, are scheduled and booked up for the next few weeks. CALF is informing faculty that CERE fall '06 courses will be available sometime during the first couple of weeks in August.