Example Context Scenario
- Former user (Deleted)
The following context scenario is for Allison McCallum (read Allison's full persona), Assistant Professor of Sociology at UM, whose goals are to create an engaging learning experience for her students, find and use the best content and tools available for her teaching and research and feel little need to ask for help while using Sakai.
The notes section to the right helps illuminate Allison's needs, behaviors and goals that were addressed in this context scenario for each step.
Context Scenario
1. It is early August and Allison is in her office, setting up the syllabus for a new upper-level undergraduate course, LING 376: Sociolinguistics, that she will be teaching in the Fall. She has taught a similar course before, LING 476, and wants to adjust her syllabus from that course for LING 376. When she goes to create a new syllabus in her LING 376 course site, she selects the LING 476 syllabus as a template and begins editing right away.
2. As she reads down her syllabus, she realizes that one of the papers students are required to read early in the course needs to be less technical because LING 376 has a younger audience than 476. She removes the citation from the syllabus and opens the Library Resources widget to embed a new citation in her syllabus. As Allison makes any edits to her syllabus, the system is constantly saving them so she does not lose any work.
3. Allison knows just the article she wants to place into her syllabus because she has used it for another class before. She quickly finds the article she is looking for by searching a few keywords from the article's title. Before adding the article to her syllabus, she notices there is a lot of new feedback on the article she has not seen before.
4. Allison has been away from teaching for most of the summer, focusing instead on catching up with research and finishing a paper that is to be published before school begins. She realizes that students have had a chance to provide feedback on the article after it was used in various classes, not just her own, last semester.
5. She investigates the feedback that includes comments from both students and faculty. The general feedback from students is that the article is dated. One of her senior faculty, Professor Donaldson, concurred that the article was a little dated and recommended instead another, more recent paper on the same topic. Allison was familiar with Professor Donaldson's recommendation, but quickly re-read the abstract and skimmed the article to see if it covered the same topics she was interested in. She decided that this paper was indeed more relevant to her class and added it to her syllabus.
6. Allison spent about 25 more minutes updating her LING 376 syllabus. She ran into a book chapter she had gotten scanned by the library's document delivery service years ago which was no longer available due to copyright restrictions. She could see this copyright warning right next to the citation in her syllabus as well as the option to replace the scanned chapter with the e-book that the library has access to online. Allison wants to adhere to copyright law, so she replaced the chapter with the entire e-book and made a note for students to read just the chapter of interest.
7. To wrap up her syllabus, Allison wanted to add an image at the top of the syllabus. She had no idea where to find the image, but had seen Professor Donaldson use it before and knew it would really complement the course description. Allison searched for the image in the Library Resources widget and found it was there as it had indeed been used by Professor Kumar in his LING 425 course. She learned the image was from the UM Image Services, Art & Art History collection - an available digital image repository she was previously unaware of. When she added the image into her syllabus, the proper source information was brought along with it. Allison decided the syllabus was good for now, closed the document and rushed off to a faculty meeting.
1. Allison almost always uses previous course content as a starting point for new work. The system should be able to allow her to use a previous page she has authored as a template for a new one.
2. General design principles: enable Allison to make changes to her document in place; prevent Allison from losing her work or encountering unexpected errors by auto-saving each change.
3. Allison often uses resources for new courses that she has used before. The system should allow her to easily find previously used content.
4. Allison has a goal to seek out the best content for her courses and uses the feedback of her students and colleagues to do so. The system should provide her students and colleagues to provide feedback on content.
5. General design principles: include relevant tools and information in the same place - Allison should be able to easily get information about the article as well as the article itself and take action on the article all from the same place.
6. Allison uses her library's document delivery service and is not aware of copyright restrictions on all her content though she is interested in adhering to copyright law. The system should make Allison aware of copyright issues and suggest alternatives.
7. Allison has a goal to engage her students more by using multimedia, but she is not familiar with how to find such content and tends to rely on colleague recommendations. The system should allow Allison to find content (including multimedia) shared by colleagues and include source information so Allison can learn how to find similar or related content on her own.
Questions raised in this scenario
- Why and how do instructors and students provide feedback on resources that are included in a syllabus (or other document)?
- What happens when Allison cannot find an article she is looking for in the Library Resources widget?
- What happens when Allison wants to search for an article that she has not used before?
- How does Allison get content into the Library Resources widget?
- Concerns around sharing content (i.e. Prof. Donaldson's image that Allison uses): political impact of sharing content, controlling sharing settings, etc.