[Sakai SEPP] Mara Hancock & Josh Holtzman - UC Berkeley Gradebook
Mara is a beekeeper, and she points out that her experience in listening to the level of the buzz is applicable to her work on the Sakai board ...
Berkeley is planning to use their new gradebook in pilot mode in Fall 2004, and then integrate it into Sakai. It has been developed as a Sakai application, but for the initial deployment they are wrapping the single tool with a "psuedo-Sakai" layer.
MIT is also developing a Sakai gradebook. MIT and Berkeley will look at possible convergence at some point.
Berkeley has a nice graphing option in the gradebook that shows a box-and-whisker graph of grade distributions. If you're only looking at a single student it shows you a bar graph instead.
The psuedo-sakai approach uses JSF, Hibernate, and Spring as basic technologies.
Nice blog, Oren. At Berkeley, from the Administrative Computing side of things, we're also looking at how to integrate e-learning and WBT technologies with our ERP platform. My hope is that we will be able to provide online training for things like Environmental Health & Safety, and integrate that data with the human resources system. I much favor this approach over maintaining separate functionality silos (training for staff delivered via a Peoplesoft product, and eLearning for students done via Sakai and elsewhere). By the way, you ought to bring up Catalyst with your cohorts at the conference -- in talking to some students, you realize that in many classes the students do the technology evangelizing. UW Prof. Gloyd's public health class embraced the collaboration tools at the suggestion of a student. Prof. Kasaba's graduate students maintain his course web. eLearning technologies should be open, to allow students (and staff) to be content creators & teachers -- that is a very positive feature of Catalyst. Have fun at the conference and maybe I'll see you in Denver in October? (and see -- you never know who's reading these weblogs!) -Bill