Gradebook 2

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Aug 12, 2011 by Former user (Deleted)Version comment
3 min read

Initial Documentation

Project Lead(s): Project Links:
Thomas Amsler, Kirk D. Alexander
What the project aims to accomplish and who should benefit from it - explained in clear, simple language.

The Gradebook 2 development effort aims to simplify and extend the user interface of the Sakai Gradebook tool.  The design flattens out the many levels of pages required to setup a Gradebook and assign scores to students for various items.  The project will also add many new features to the Gradebook in particular to meet the needs of large classes by automating or simplifying the scoring where possible (such as dropping lowest scores.)  The new features include:

  • Spreadsheet style user interface
  • Extra Credit items and categories
  • Item weighting in categories
  • Migration of Gradebook structure to new sites
  • Drop Lowest scores
  • Excuse items on a per student basis
  • Equal and unequal  item weighting
  • Item level grader comments
  • Student View display for instructors
  • Extensive logging of all transactions
  • Import/Export of structure as well as grades
  • Statistics: percentages, medians, averages, rank in class, means, standard deviations
  • Letter Grading (with calculations: converts to numeric, fixed scale)
     
Which institutions and individuals are committed to it, for how long, and in what roles.

The University of California at Davis has done and is doing the development work.  Georgia Tech has helped with the QA process and plans to put it into production probably in 2009.  The University of California at Berkeley is considering adopting it and Rutgers University has begun experimenting with it and Indiana University has expressed interest in the tool.  rSmart plans to convert it to release 2.6 and offer it as a beta test in the Fall of 2009.

What other projects, if any, does this project relate to or depend upon?

Gradebook 2 builds on the data model of the existing Sakai Gradebook tool and can be run along side it.   Grades pushed to Gradebook 1 from Assignments, Test & Quizzes and Forums are also visible and contribute to course grades in Gradebook 2.  At present the Gradebook API is unaltered so other projects using this API should not be affected.

What does the project know and not know about how it will achieve its aims at this point?

Response to Gradebook 2 has been overwhelmingly positive and the project is on track to be adopted in production at UCDavis in the fall of 2009.   Additional features have been defined that could be implemented later but these are known to require enhancements to the API and should involve some wider community dialog.   If, indeed, the tool is adopted by rSmart there should be strong ongoing support for this tool.

There has ben work at Indiana to more tightly integrate the Assignments tool with the Gradebook such that Assignments will use Gradebook as its data source.  This has involved some API changes and this work needs to be integrated with Gradebook 2.   This involves a mutual commitment between UCDavis and Indiana.  This work has not yet been scheduled.

Finally, Gradebook 2's future with respect to Sakai 3 needs to be evaluated.  It should be technically possible to run Gradebook 2 as a widget in the new context but the more interesting issue will be to alter Gradebook 2 to use the new features and concepts imbedded in Sakai 3.   For starters it's data entries should become part of the JSR repository.  This would be a first step in allowing other kinds of content to be "marked" or commented upon in a more generalized grading/assessment tool.  U?CDavis will investigate this further after Gradebook 2 is in production for awhile.

What public communication methods are being used, how may a curious person contribute to or track the project?

Currently all feature requests and bugs are being tracked in the foundation Jira in the Gradebook 2 Contrib Project: http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/GRBK.

Ongoing discussion has now moved to the sakai-dev or the [Building Sakai] discussion.  The Sakai Foundation confluence and current documentation links are listed at the top of this page.

Ongoing Documentation


Brief quarterly status reports: a paragraph or two describing current status, what's been accomplished and what challenges are being faced.