Sections and Ad Hoc Groups

For the purpose of this document I'm going to make the following definitions:

Section: Sections are primarily an administrative device. Sections are assigned insructors (Section leaders). Section data is often supplied by the registrar, and students often register for a section when they register for the class. Sections tend to be tied to a meeting time and place. Sections are used to distribute work in the gradebook, announcements and email are often sent to just one section, and assignments may have varied due dates based on section meeting times.

Ad hoc groups: Ad hoc groups are primarily a pedagogical device. Ad hoc groups don't have a formal leader, in fact students may form groups on their own. Ad hoc groups are usually used to foster collaborative work. Ad hoc groups of students might have a shared workspace, or turn in an assignment together.

Section/Ad hoc group Bundle: It's hard to get a good label for this concept. One class may have several bundles of sections or Ad hoc groups. For example, a class might have a bundle of 4 sections, a bundle of 20 project teams (ad hoc groups), and a bundle of 8 lab sections. There may be rules around the bundle - for example it sections might have a maximum size of 30 and students may switch while the labs project teams have a maximum size of 5 and the membership is assigned by the TA.

Sections and Ad Hoc Teams answer very different user goals. The rules that define them are quite different. In order to simplify the interface and make life easier for our users it may make sense to treat them as separate tools, and prioritize them separately.

Note that MIT & Stanford took created sectioning tools. We didn't support Ad hoc groups, just sections. In addition we only had one section bundle. The class can set up sections only - no labs or other types of sections. (some one from Stanford may want to edit this)

Sectioning is baseline required functionality for a course management system. MIT, Berkeley and Stanford have all said they cannot release without. It's my impression that people are genuinely surprised to learn that Sakai doesn't have sectioning yet. So it's a high priority, but it's not exciting. No one will say "Sakai is innovative because it has sectioning." But if it's not there they will say "We can't use Sakai because it doesn't have sectioning."

Ad hoc groups are exciting - when we call Sakai a Collaborative Learning Environment, this is the sort of thing we have in mind. If we deliver this, it will enable a lot of exciting possibilities in new tools. At MIT we've heard calls for this sort of functionality for years. Unfortunately it's been pushed of as we work on basic administrative tools, like sectioning.