User Case 1: Creating a Grant Proposal

Actors

• Harry is the leader of a research group
• Judy is a researcher
• Roberta is a reasearch group leader in a Italian University
• James is a copyright and IPR lawyer used by the organisation

Use Case

Harry has identified an opportunity for his research group with one of the EU funding bodies. To build a better case for funding his research he decides to collaborate with an Intalian University and agrees with a colleague in that University, Roberta. Harry sets up a worksite in the Sakai and adds a Discussion Tool, a Resources Tool and an Wiki Tool. Since they need to explore the outline agreement of their collaboration, Harry creates a workspace within the Wiki and gives members of the worksite access to the collaboration space. He then sends an email to Roberta inviting her to join the worksite.

She joins the worksite and begins to outline what her research group has to offer in the area, and what her research group has done in the past that is relevant to this proposal. Together they begin to build a Wiki space that contains the basis for their propsal. After several days they have an issue over shared copyright. They bring together some of the documents and publish them as PDF's using the Wiki PDF tool. They put these into the Sakai resources area and send them to James to answer the questions about shared copyright and IPR. It becomes clear that James needs more information and the email exchanges are getting in the way of collaboration. James joins the worksite in Sakai and is given access to the Wiki workspace by virtue of his membership of the worksite. He reviews the source documentation and makes some changes to specific wording. Harry and Roberto are monitoring the pages for changes by email notification so are aware of all the changes that have been made.

As the detail of the workschedule is being developed the core team need to ask for the opinion of Judy. Harry changes the permissions on some sensitive documents and invites Judy to join the Sakai worksite. Judy reviews the areas that concern certain aspects of the research. Judy references some content from previous research work sites and copies some of the supporting material into the resources area.

Finally the team build a proposal document that is converted to PDF and delivered as the final proposal.

Alternatives would include:

• the draft proposal is converted to Open Office document format or Microsoft Word and final editing is done within version control in that application
• sections of the draft proposal are cut and pasted into a Word application form supplied by the funding agency

3 months later the grant is awarded, Harry and Roberto create a new Wiki space within the Sakai Workspace and begin planning the implementation. The original proposal workspace is restricted to the members of the management committee.

Use Case 2: Collaborative writing exercise in an undergraduate course

Actors

• Phumzile is the course convenor for a 3rd-year undergraduate course in Economics of Developing Countries.
• Reza is one of 10 tutors teaching on the course, responsible for a tutor group of 12 students.
• Susan, Bongani and Jonathan are students in Reza?s tutor group.

Use Case

Task

Phumzile requires students, working in groups of 3, to choose one of 4 developing countries (Brazil, India, Nigeria and South Africa) and write together an assessment of that country?s economic development over the last 3 decades.

Phumzile decides that a wiki would be an appropriate tool to facilitate students collaboratively writing their assessments. Previously this type of exercise had been done with Word documents using track changes, but that required lots of emailing revised documents around, and made it hard for students to work on their group assignments at the same time.

Setup

As the course already has a course site created for it in the Sakai environment, Phumzile creates a template wiki with some instructions about the assignment on the home page, and then creates 12 wikis (one for each tutor group) from the template wiki.

Phumzile would like to discourage students borrowing work from other groups, so the wikis are configured by default so that no students have access to any wiki. Phumzile assigns administration rights for each wiki to the respective tutor for that tutor group.

Reza prepares for the first tutorial session with his tutor group by logging into the Sakai environment, and granting students in his tutor group read and update permissions to the tutor group?s wiki.

Reza explains the assignment to the students, who organize themselves into 4 project groups of 4 students. Each project group chooses a different country. All students in the tutor group will use the same wiki for their work, although each project group will be working on a different country in different pages of the wiki.

Collaboration

Susan, Bongani and Jonathan login to the course site, where they see the wiki for their tutor group appear. Over a period of several weeks, they each write a section of the assignment, then collate them together, and do some editing of each others? work to create a coherent composite document.

They find it useful to look at how the other project groups in their tutorial groups are tackling their assignments on other countries, but do not have access to the work of students in other tutorial groups, so cannot compare their own work with any other students working on the same country.
Assesment

On the due date for the assignment to be handed in, Susan creates a PDF of their set of pages from the wiki, and submits the PDF for assessment using the Assignment handin tool.

Reza assesses the assignment, and allocates it a mark. However, because a component of the final mark for each student is based on his or her respective contribution to the project group?s effort, Reza also logs into the course environment, and views the wiki contribution history of each student in turn.

The contribution history shows the changes and additions that the student made to the wiki. Reza notices that Susan and Bongani made extensive input and contributions, whereas Jonathan's changes were less frequent and of a less substantive nature, so awards a higher contribution mark to Susan and Bongani than to Jonathan.

Use Case 3: Role playing in an undergraduate course

Actors

• Frank is the course convenor for a 3rd-year undergraduate course

Use Case

Setup

Students are allocated different country names, one of eight different issues they need to look at as well as belonging to one of two sub-committees. They each have to a central online course environment as well as 1 of 8 different environments depending which issue they need to look at. In each of the 2 environments they belong to their country name and which sub-committee they are members of need to be displayed and not their real names/ids.

Task

Frank requires the students to make available, in the central course, information regarding their country. This counts towards their final mark.

They also need to interact with other countries on a global scale, those looking at the same issue they are as well as with countries in the same sub-committee. They therefore heavily utilised the communication tools (forum and chat) made available in the 2 course environments to interact with one another.

The course environment also keeps track of the number of postings made by each student which is used in allocating a mark. The students also have access to the log files of the chat sessions which acts as the minutes of their meetings.

Comments

Although this use case adds requirements to collaboration in general ( discussion, chat ), and I believe that any tools of that type should address the issues raised, however I am not certain that a Wiki is the best tool for this purpose since it provides a very unstructured environment. If anyone feels that I have got this wrong, and the use case outlines requirements for a wiki, please say.