Current Status and Problem
Courses are created via an account (sitemaker). This account has maintain access, but not administrative access. Due to these access issues, the sitemaker account has a limitation in that it can only create sites via the Worksite setup tool.
How one is able to create course sites in Sakai
Currently, there are two mechanisms for creating course sites in Sakai. These are:
1. Sites tool: for admins, allows complete control of creating site (including siteid). This method only allows users to create sites, but the respective tools and pages are not included.
2. Worksite Setup tool: for maintainers, allows users to create sites of certain types. These types can be controlled via the sitesetup.xml configuration and other means (e.g. realms). By creating sites in this manner, the user is prompted to select their given term, and define what course number to give the site. The user has no control over the site id, as it is automatically generated using this mechanism.
*Note, using both the above methods *does not set a provider id for the site. The provider id allows the providers to detect that they need to "look up" information for this site.
Current Manual Course Creation Strategy
Courses are created as a type "course". Here are some "brief" steps.
1. When creating the course site, there is a dropdown for the term. The user selects this term, which currently is controlled by the sakai.properties configuration file in the tomcat instance.
Problem: this data is not synchronized with external Banner data, so only one term may appear that may be applicable (e.g. dropdown says Summer 06, when really it should say Summer Session II).
2. User then is prompted for how the roster should be established. The user is then asked to select something like " 2005,FALL,SMPL,001,001" or "Choose user roster not listed from above". The user selects the roster not listed from above.
3. User is asked to fill in (textbox) the "Subject","Course", and "Section" for this course site.
Problem This is ad-hoc, and user's have limited space to add the course information. Again, this is entirely controlled by parameters set in the sakai.properties file.
4. The user is asked to add more rosters, and authorization person's name if necessary. Usually rosters are not added, and authorizer's name is something like kdalex@ucdavis.edu.
5. From here, the course site is created with a default tool set the user selects from.
Current Batching Strategy
The batching mechanism is in the ucd-enterprise-data module in UC Davis' svn repository, and is implemented via quartz. Batching has yet to be QA tested, but essentially goes "hand-in-hand" with the providers because the one thing that the batching process handles is assigning a "provider id" for course sites. In relation to the manual course site creation, the batching mechanism introduces some different functionality. Currently each CRN is its own site in Sakai, and only CRNs with rosters are created at batch time.
1. creates course site "skeleton" with the following attributes:
i. creates site id with a pattern of TERMCD and CRN. An example is 20061012345
ii. creates a site title (tab) with the pattern C (this is a MAJOR difference from the manual process)
iia. SUBJ COURSENUMBER SECTION TERMABBREVIATION TERMYEAR (e.g. BIS 001A 001 SSS WQ06)
iii. adds site information also (e.g. description, long description, etc)
2. adds tools and pages to the site (from a sakai.properties configuration)