Some notes:

• Notice the user goal is almost never about creating a group or a shared space but rather it is driven by what they want the group to do together
• Some of the activity diagrams describe tasks not directly part of creating a group but the kinds of things the group does informs group creation and to the user it may need to be one continuous workflow  so I've included them here

Scenarios for Design

The following tasks are a small subset of those that will eventually be supported in Sakai 3.  They are meant to drive the initial design work in this area representing a broad spectrum of common activities.  (See a larger set of representative tasks: Representative community related tasks).  These are meant to represent the actions, informational needs, decisions, etc. for the user generally and are not necessarily how they would occur in Sakai 3.  In fact, some effort has been made not to get into specific solutions here but rather focus on the flow of the activity, the information users might need to see along the way, decisions to be made, etc.  Many of the activity boxes likely need to be unpacked.  This is meant to be a general overview.

Create-1

Goal:      Start a special interest group (SIG)
Activity:  Create SIG with some known contacts and encourage others to join
Who:      All
Scenario: Turning a group of personal network contacts into a SIG that people can join

Christy Gonzala is not blind but is visually impaired. She's made several contacts with people who have similar issues and formed a group within her social network that she uses as a mailing list. She thinks others might be dealing with similar issues as the friends she's made and wants to to make a group that people can find and join, starting with her own contacts, so she doesn't have to invite people and so she can share ownership with her friend James (so he can add and approve). They may also want to create a website.

 

Create-2

Goal:  Share resources and collaboratively create material together
Activity:  Add new people to group who match certain criteria
Who:  All
Scenario: Growing group of TAs with collaboration space

Catalina is prepping for the upcoming year and the new Teaching Assistants for Spanish 1 she'll be managing.  She needs to identify who all the TAs are and add them to her "TA knowledge sharing group" which she started 2 years ago. Once she's added them to the group, they'll have access to the collaborative space the group has been using to share information, discuss class details and work on course materials together.  She'll need to let them know when it's available and would like to send out some additional guidelines about the site.  Once invited, the TAs visit the site to get an idea of what they are in for this semester.

Assumptions:

• "TA knowledge sharing group" already exists & they have a collaboration space 
• TA role and department information provisioned outside Sakai but known by Sakai

 

Create-3

Goal:  Assess students on team-based work
Activity:  Have students work on a team based assignment
Who:  Instructional staff
Scenario: Create an assignment and randomly assign students in groups of 3 to work together to complete the assignment.

Robin, a professor in the Business School, encourages her students to do a significant amount of group work in her International Business course.  Several problems during a term are introduced to students who then may work in teams of 3-5 and need to pull together information from a variety of resources in order to fully address the problem. Student presentations of their work on the problems may be included.  Since they often won't get to choose their teammates when they are out in the work world, Robin likes to coordinate the teams herself paying some attention to class schedules, and where students live.  She likes to switch the groups around so students get a chance to work with a variety of others.  However, the groups for assignment 1 will come back together at the end of the term to work on a follow-on project together so she'd like to "save" the the initial groups.

This first problem requires the student teams to collaboratively write an executive summary-style proposal for a new American run IT firm that would like to locate in India and serve customers all over the world.  Each team has a slightly different scenario.  For this first problem she expects the students to have more questions than answers which is the point.  Their proposal should give the company fodder as to the important issues they need to tease out in creating this new venture located overseas.  The last problem for the term will gather these same teams together to write recommendations about the questions they bring up in this proposal.

 

Create-4

Goal:  Have students collaboratively work in project teams online
Activity:  Create a space to share material and create collaborative documents
Who:  Instructional staff, students
Scenario:  Allow students to work collaboratively on a project and share results online with the entire class

Marsh is teaching a 30-student course in which students work in teams to construct conference posters. As it is a pure distance-learning course, he wants to assign students at random to teams. He also wants to generate for each team various team-specific tools that the team members can use for collaboration. These include a separate forum and Resources subdirectory for each team. The students will use these to collaborate on and prepare their posters. When they are ready, they will submit their posters to the instructor.  The instructor would also like the posters to be available for other students to view.

 

Create-5

Goal:  Assess students on team-based work
Activity:  Students self create working groups
Who:  Instructional staff
Scenario:  Students create groups based on interest in a particular topic and who else is in the group.

Students in "Evaluation of Systems and Services" will work on a group project over the next few weeks.  The instructor would like them to organize themselves around shared interest in a topic.  In class, she allows students with a topic idea to describe their idea and then asks them to start a group in the LMS that other students can join.  Students have until the end of the day tomorrow to sign up for a group or suggest a new one.  They must have 3 people in each group and no more than 5.   Those groups that don't gain the required 3 will have to join another group after tomorrow.

Susan suggested her group evaluate Facebook and she ended up with 5 people joining her group .  They'll use the space to share resources, contact information, schedules and materials as they're working on them.  The system will help them keep track of versions as they iterate on their various assignements.  They're also hoping it will help them schedule team meetings and the such which is always challenging with their busy and varying schedules

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Create-6

Goal: Support online course
Activity: 
Who:  Instructional staff, administrators
Scenario A:  Create course space for course

Catalinais preparing for her summer Spanish for Heritage Speakers class during Spring break.   Although the summer semester is still a couple months away, she knows it will sneak up on her quickly so she wants to get her course space started.  She begins with getting her syllabus set up so students can see it sooner than later if they are curious about what the class is all about.  She's curious to see if anyone has signed up for the class yet so she decides to add the roster to the site.  Once she chooses the roster for her class (there are 3 sections of this class being taught but each instructor wants to have their own course space), she see's that 2 students are already signed up for the course.  Since she's not ready for them see the space yet, she keeps it in draft form for now and will only alert the students to the space once she's got the syllabus cleaned up.
 
Scenario B: Create course spaces for 2 sections of same class (language class)

Same as above except Catalina is teaching 2 of the sections.

 

Scenario C:  Create course space for course and discussion sections
Ahmad is teaching History of American Life this semester.  He'll be lecturing to over 100 students twice a week.  Students are also required to attend an hour discussion session each week which will be led by one of 2 TAs.  Discussions are limited to 15 students at most.  Ahmad needs to get his course space set up.  Most of the course content will be shared across all students but some material created by the TAs will be specific to their discussion sections.  Since he has been teaching this class for several years now, he'll get a kick start by reusing much of the material on last year's course space. 

Create-7

Goal: Create an equal access process for students to sign up for sections/tutorials
Activity:  Have all students sign up for a group
Who:  Instructional staff, students
Scenario:  Tutorial Group Signup

Bio 1 has a lecture (in large lecture theatre) with 1000 students enrolled and tutorial sessions (in smaller groups, say 10-20 students).  Ashish, the instructor, would like all students to sign up for a tutorial session in the first week of term. Ahish will create 50 sessions now but he won't allow students to sign up until next Wednesday at noon.  However, he wants them to be able to see information about the sessions now so they can begin planning. They likely have to do this with many of their courses and make sure time tables don't clash.  They are also anxious about getting their preferred tutor and that the location works with their schedule before and after.  First, Ashish, will see if the course convenor, Michael, will create all of the tutorials for him.  If he's doesn't have time right away, the instructor will do it himself.  Signup will be enabled on Wednesday at noon which Ashish also wants students know in order to provide equal opportunity to people to get the best slots.  He would love for the sign-up time to show up in the student's calendars and allow them to see if they have conflicts.  Each student will need to be signed up for 1 tutorial. Students can continue to switch their (what tutorials they get into for other course will affect and perhaps change the tutorial they want for this course) selection until the end of the 1st week of class.  At that point, any further changes will be by course admin approval only.  The course admin will make appropriate changes in the application since an ovveride of class size will be necessary in some cases.

Task Conceptual Models

Task:  Create-3 Have students work on a team-based assignment
Persona:  Catalina De Silva (Faculty - GSI Manager in Spanish)