2.1.0 Release Notes

Changes in Sakai 2.1
====================

New features
------------

Group awareness - If sections or user teams have been defined for a site, the
group names will be displayed in a filtering menu on the Assignment Detail,
Course Grade, and Roster screens. "All" will always be the first choice on the
menu. When a group is selected, only students who are members of that group
will be displayed. The filter choice does not effect any export functionality.

Grader role - In the first release of the Gradebook, only two types of user
were supported: "instructors" (who could do anything) and "students" (who could
at most view their own grades). In 2.1, the Gradebook supports more finely
grained permissions, allowing creation of grader roles who can view and change
scores for students but not add or modify assignments. The Section Info
application can be used to assign sections to "teaching assistants", who can
view and change scores only for the students in their assigned sections.

Grading history log UI - On the Assignment Details and Course Grade screens,
there is a new column, "Log", to let instructors and graders view the history
of changes to a student's assignment score or course grade. The log history
itself is displayed when the log icon is clicked, and hidden when the icon is
re-clicked or when the log window's close icon is clicked. The log display is
user draggable and should adjust automatically to font size changes.

"Not Counted" assignments - Assignments can optionally be set to not count
towards the final course grade. By default, they are. On the Overview, Roster,
and Student View screens, scores for not-counted assignments are displayed in
parentheses and with an explanatory HTML "title" attribute. On the Assignment
Details screen, their special status is noted in the "Options" area.

In the Sakai integration, Gradebook storage is now deleted when the Site is
deleted.

Changed features
----------------

Raw scores displayed to students - In 2.01, the Student View screen displayed
assignment scores both as percentages and as a letter grade based on the
percentage. In 2.1, the redundant percentage column is replaced with the raw
score entered for the assignment.

A summary of the current grade feedback options now appears on the Overview
page, so that instructors who are new to the Gradebook application will know
what their students are seeing.

Database changes
----------------

A new column was added to the GB_GRADABLE_OBJECT_T table to support "Not
Counted" assignments. The SQL table definitions for supported databases have
been updated. For existing installations, the following script may be used to
update the table:

gradebook/component/src/sql/*/sakai_gradebook_2.0.1_to_2.1.sql

Sakai permissions changes
-------------------------

In Sakai 2.01, the Gradebook integration relied on coarse-grained
permissions:

gradebook.access : Equivalent to a "student" role
gradebook.maintain : Equivalent to an "instructor" role

Instead, the 2.1 Gradebook permissions are:

gradebook.gradeAll : Able to grade all students in the course.
gradebook.gradeSection : Able to grade students in assigned sections.
gradebook.editAssignments : Able to add, delete, and edit assignments; able
to change gradebook settings.
gradebook.viewOwnGrades : Able to view their own scores and course grade in
the Student View, if allowed by gradebook feedback options.

For existing installations, the translation is:

gradebook.access -> gradebook.viewOwnGrades
gradebook.maintain -> gradebook.gradeAll + gradebook.editAssignments

Any existing realms with roles that include the "gradebook.access" or
"gradebook.maintain" functions need to be changed to map to the new functions
instead.

Standalone changes
------------------

The standalone Gradebook is now dependent on the SectionAwareness service to
determine permissions, enrollments, and sections. (Or, speaking more
generically, to determine site memberships and groups.) As a result, some
implementation of SectionAwareness must be built before the standalone
Gradebook can run. See the standalone documentation for more information.