scrivel

One thing I really miss about Moodle are the tools for both monitoring and aggregating information about student activity. If I click on “Participants,” and then click on a student’s name, I get activity reports that tell me what the student has been up to. I especially like the “Forum” tab, which takes me to a page that shows all the forum contributions that student has made. This comes in real handy when I go to assign a grade to a student’s discussion forum contributions over the term.

I can also see when students have been on the site, their blog posts, and even what pages or texts they’ve looked at. I don’t use such information to grade students (since that would be capricious), but it’s useful to know if a student hasn’t been downloading any of the texts they’re supposed to be reading for class.

Sakai doesn’t have any features like this–at least not the version that we have at our school. As someone pointed out in the comments, some schools gimp features in local instances of the program. If that’s the case here, I’d love to know about it. If not, I think lots of teachers would appreciate having tools like these.

Since some Sakai folks were nice enough to comment on the previous entry in this series, I thought I’d tone down the snark a bit, and also start with something I happen to like about Sakai. I love the fact that when you log in to Sakai, what you see first is your own “workspace,” a kind of clearinghouse for the various classes or collaborative group you belong to. In your very own workspace you see announcements from the different courses or groups you belong to.

I like this, because it fits the ethos of participatory culture that characterizes how my students tend to engage with technology in extracurricular contexts. In other words, it’s like Facebook or Myspace. So, instead of having only strictly delineated course sites, where the instructor controls everything, these workspaces in Sakai give students their own spaces that are linked to their various courses. (Facebook, by the way, might eventually be an interesting alternative to traditional CMSs, though I think the “Courses” application has a long way to go.) (more…)

At my old university, I was using course software called “Moodle,” which I loved for both its ease and its power. Now, at my new institution, I have to use course management software called Sakai, which is both very expensive and (as I see it) a whole truck-load of suck. This is my first post in a series in which I explore what I miss about Moodle, and what I dislike about Sakai.

For background, go to the Sakai website and watch (if you can stand all 11 minutes of it) the “Sakai Video Report” that’s featured prominently there. Note the weird mix of techno-babble and CEO-speak. Now, go to Moodle’s website, and look at their page on Pedagogy. Note how they actually have a page devoted to pedagogy! You may not completely agree with them about how learning happens, but it’s clear that Moodle was developed from the learner’s point of view. Where Sakai is a glorified version of Lotus Notes–the guy in the video admits as much–Moodle was built from the ground up on widely-accepted learning theory. (more…)