Goal Management Tools
Goal Management Tools
Overview
Course Management Systems often enable central administration of classes from a technical perspective. However, faculty and students tend to remain isolated from the program in which the class takes place. IT systems seem to perpetuate the traditional "closed door" classroom.
There is increasing demand for a "goal oriented" view of student progress toward institutional, program and personal outcomes for the purposes of curriculum mapping, program level assessment and student advising. While portfolio software has been frequently deployed to gather data for student assessment it often fails to address the bulk of student activity in their coursework.
The Living SchoolBook is involved in an effort to design and develop a suite of courseware and portfolio tools built on top of the Sakai framework that will address this gap. Syracuse University's School of Education plans to deploy a suite of "goal aware" tools to meet accreditation requirements. We presented this idea at the Sakai/OSP conference in Austin in December 2005, and more recently at the conference in Vancouver.
Please see the glossary for definitions of some key terms used when discussing and using the goal management set of tools.
Features
Our tools enable users to create goal sets within worksites. A goal set is simply a collection of defined goals; goals are hierarchically defined program or course objectives that students are expected to perform, and can be linked with various activities within Sakai (currently assignments, OSP wizard/matrix and data points). Support has been added for creating associations between worksites through which cross-contextual links can be made. A link, in this case, is a way to attach or tag an activity in a worksite to a goal in an associated worksite. A common scenario, for example, would be to have a program level worksite in which program goals are defined, and course sites that are associated to the program site. This setup allows for links to be made from activities within the course sites to the goals within the program site. Then, the students' submissions for an activity can be rated based on performance toward linked goals.
Currently, there are three types of activities in Sakai that are "goal-aware": assignments, OSP matrix/wizard and data points. The assignment tool has been extended with workflow to link assignments to goals and to rate students' assignment submissions. A new tool, the data point tool, allows for creation of generic activities (data points). For each data point, ratable submission items are automatically generated (from a selection of roles). This serves as a way to enter data for activities that occur outside of Sakai, but need to be reported on. Users creating matrix cells and wizard pages can also link these to goals so that users submitting completed cells and/or pages for evaluation can be rated based on performance towards linked goals.
See the Features page for more detail.
Demo
FIXME - This demo is outdated and frequently unavailable!
We have set up a public demo which can be accessed to view this tool. Feel free to login and play around.
Download
Our latest release is version 2.4.
To see the latest development efforts, you can download the trunk.
Archived Versions
Bug Report
Please submit bug reports and/or feature requests so that we can improve current and future versions of these tools.