Here are some general observations and directions collected when two members of the IT group at Boston University's School of Management recently interviewed and observed 8 student users of Sakai.
All of the students we met with were new to Sakai this semester, and all were more familiar with Blackboard. Some of these students preferred Blackboard; a smaller number preferred Sakai, but many of the Blackboard advocates went out of their way to say that they preferred Blackboard because it was so familiar.
Training/marketing/UI points:
Since student expectations here are shaped by what they know of Blackboard, our students aren't necessarily quick to find attractive features that Sakai has and Blackboard doesn't. In addition, student exposure to Sakai tools was dictated by which tools the faculty member chose to use. In cases where tool use was limited students did not have an opportunity to become acquainted with useful features that Sakai has and Blackboard lacks.
Several students were very impressed when the more Sakai-savvy member of our team showed them
- That Sakai offered easy motion between courses (Since we're running Sakai as a pilot, students hadn't seen how multiple Sakai courses appear on the nav bar.)
- That Sakai allowed batch uploads and deletions (WebDAV)
- The Site Info tool and how it is used to manage content on the site from a teaching assistant perspective
Several students became much more interested in Sakai when they learned that it was an open-source project.
Students expressed strong opinions both for and against the organization of Resources in Sakai, as contrasted to the way BlackBoard chunks the same information under separate buttons. The majority preferred seeing course content condensed into one tool: Resources. However, many students still felt overwhelmed by the variations in content organization. Some students inquired about arranging content within a tool via a preference option or at minimum having the ability to maintain a particular sort order from session to session. We heard a demand for more standardization in the way professors organize and group assignments and materials in the software. It's unclear to us whether this can be addressed through the software, through training, or not readily at all. We are encouraging best practices dialogues among faculty and are using course site organization as a starting point.
Students like the course tabs since they provide one-click access to various course sites; however, a few commented on the less than obvious shape of the tabs.
Even students who preferred Sakai had many issues with the visual presentation of information, beginning with the login. Most felt there was not enough contrast of text (size and color) within the various tools pages, Resources in particular. Many commented that there was too much wasted space on each page, Home and Resources in particular).
About half the students we spoke with, all after two and a half months' experience with Sakai, complained that the login link was easy to miss in the upper right-hand corner. They wanted the log-in fields to appear on the entrance page, but we understand this to be a programming issue that our developers will address when they can. Meanwhile, it seems reasonable to give the log-in more prominence position on the page, since it's the only thing on that page that will interest users most of time. (Confession: my boss had to show me how to get to my test course on Sakai after I was away from it for about a month after a brief introduction to the project. - KM)
Students we spoke with relied primarily on the Announcement and Resources tools. Professors here have not yet pushed use of the collaborative tools; that's a separate issue.
Most students told us that Announcements was always the first tool they checked in both Sakai and Blackboard. Many told us that using Sakai, they received "too many emails" as notification of announcements. Some were not particularly aware that they could adjust the frequency of low priority announcement notifications. One student asked how announcements were different from emails. She wanted to check her announcements once a day and leave it at that.
Several students asked how feasible it would be to let them arrange the order of the tool buttons themselves. For example, if a course utilized the Resources section most frequently, they wanted this tool at the top of the list.
Students had many issues with the graphic and navigational structure of the Resources tool, which saw heavy use. Recapping an earlier post, the properties link was lamentably prominent, and the folder expansion arrows were essentially invisible above the menu items. The Sakai interface borrows windows/mac symbols without looking enough like Windows Explorer to be read the same way. After clicking on "properties" and finding nothing useful to them, students tended to hit the back button, leaving the tool entirely. Needless to say, they found this whole sequence annoying.
A number of students were eager to make the Announcements and/or Calendar into central organizing features of their online course experience.
We're also in the early stages of implementing a portal that will eventually offer access to numerous University services with one login. Because students were so interested in making Announcements and/or Calendar an organizing centerpiece for a frequent login to course software, we spent some time looking at the Calendar tool and will send a separate post about that.
Kathy Moore, Melissa Zarella
IT Department
School of Management
Boston University
kemoore@bu.edu