|
In the original wireframes we called them "assessments" - which we rejected.
We opted for assignments, because we heard people calling them that during usability tests I think "items" is *too* generic. It's not going to be clear what to users what an "item" is. It like calling them "things." From Vivie Sinou's email to sakai-dev (Tuesday, October 03, 2006 5:05 PM):
One area of great concern - and a source of confusion for our users - has been the label of "add assignment" in the Assignments Tool and "add assignent" in the Gradebook tool. I don't have any brilliant solutions to suggest, but I wanted to bring it to the developers' and UI folks' attention. In our legacy ETUDES system, gradebook items for which students do not submit something in the Assignments Tool (i.e. things like a speech, discussion participation, etc.) are labelled as 'non-submissible assignments'. Other schools may have other suggestions on how to handle this issue. I might suggest the terminology: grade book entry. L
"Assignment" was an uneasy, imperfect choice that no one involved in the original design decisions was particularly pleased with. Nevertheless, I do not want to replace it hastily to mitigate one problem only to have another set of confused, annoyed faculty possibly tell us, e.g., ""grade entry' suggests entering scores" or to have the new terminology come up short upon the introduction of gradebook categories. Furthermore, the term "assignments" appears in GB contexts (other than the nav menu) where a simple swap of one term for another won't work.
One question: does the primary source of confusion at IU and Foothill have to do with the fact that "assignments" created in the gradebook are not linked in any way to the assignments tool or is the issue still as described above in the original feature request? If so, I'll note that Vivie does seem to suggest that "Assignments" was the term used in the legacy ETUDES system's gradebook, with a distinction made between admissible and non-admissible assignments. Ideally, the decision will be based on some additional community and user feedback. Was "grade book entry" suggested by a faculty member? Can we spend a little time testing various solutions on faculty? I suggested "Add Column" at one point, but I don't remember why that was deemed problematic. Finally, let me add that the "fix" version for this is not going to be 2.3. The non-submissible assignments in our legacy system were NOT part of the gradebook. They were an option in the Assignments tool. In other words, all types of 'assignments' (whether they included submissions and/or only held grades) were part of the Assignments tool. Thus the confusion for our users.
We're using Gradebook for recording attendance at tutorial (discussion section) sessions, using a mark of 0 or 1 (would be nice to have a grade-scale of Attended / Did not attend / Excused that can be set per item rather than per gradebook).
So something generic would be more appropriate. I think "entry" is good. We've had the same issue at Rutgers, personally I favor the generic "entry" too, and I also think that there is nothing wrong with "item". "Column" is what WebCT uses, it's a good choice but only if the visual representation ends up as a column in a table, in the case of the Sakai gradebook it may turn out as a row depending on which page you are on.
The problem is that the term is describing two things - what is being added to the gradebook, and what it represents to the instructor and students. We have faculty who record things like clicker ID numbers for personal response systems, as well as the things like attendance and exams that were already mentioned, none of these are "assignments". Any non-generic term will fail the second meaning at some point, while a term like "column" works because it clearly does not apply to the second meaning (but then it fails the first meaning as it's too visually specific). I'll try to solicit some faculty feedback. Gradebook entry is what we have been calling it. So there is an assignment (in the assignment tool) which has a gradebook entry in the GBook tool. But we can go with whatever works.
When we used to recommend a variety of electronic gradebook options (desktop applications as well as websites) and in my own experience with electronic gradbooks as a middle and high school teacher, it was always something generic like ITEM. Each item then was defined by title, category, and point-value. In Sakai, I suppose each item should also be defined by source/location/origin/type (ex.: submitted assignment, samigo assessment, discussion posting, oral presentation, interpretive dance, "other"). Maybe the challenge is in defining this term-- the term that describes where the Gradebook is supposed to get the values or whether the instructor is supposed to add them.
By the way, I'd like to add self-assessment as a type. Self-assessment is pretty standard pedagogy, isn't it? I haven't seen a feature request for it yet; maybe instructors are asking students to self-assess offline and then manually adding it to the Gradebook themselves. Instructor feedback on terminology could be quite enlightening. This comment tread seems to be leaning toward a generic term. If instructors are leaning the same way, why? Might this reveal a desire to keep track of things other than grades in their gradebooks?... not just attendance and participation but things like consent forms or their mentor's name or anything that maps well into a spreadsheet. Paper gradebooks are often filled with this sort of info alongside grades. These sorts of things might accumulate in a zero-credit category and could allow for non-numeric entries. By genericizing the term for "assignments," Sakai will give instructors the perfect reason to think outside the gradebook box and remember all the other ways they use their little black books. I don't want to suggest that Gradebook should swallow Post-It, but that instructors will recognize the power of gradebook "Items" instead of Assignments or Assessments. A generalized term should reflect generalized functionality. See
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
Task
Closed
Major
Assignments terminology is not accurate for all Items that will be tracked in the Gradebook
We went back and forth on this issue a bit during the UI development phase. I think we opted for assignments instead of item because there will eventually be other kinds of items you can add to the gradebook, like categories of . . . . items? Any other thoughts on this? Ben, do you remember the pros and cons?