Mythic Logos

Just some observations on bad user interface issues in Sakai. I am numbering it out of curiosity; there is no reason a user (reader) should see this numbering.

1. Everything is about lots of pages and clicks. I designed the discussion part of the course to have a forum every week. This required creating 12 different forums each of which involved clicking Insert New, followed by a new page with title and date of opening, selecting the category, and then enabling grading, by forum with a point value of 10. Several redundant button pushes (category level functionality? Default category of last time?) plus 24 different pages loaded.
2. Each forum’s ordering to be changed involves hitting an Up/Down button, one row at a time. I dealt with it by knowing what order I wanted initially and inputting them in that order. I actually had to start with the last week and input them in reverse chronological order to get the effect I wanted.
3. The gradebook does link to the discussions, but you have to hit update grade in a gradable post before it does; it then shows up to students. It also goes into the category of Unassigned. This means that I need to edit 12 grade items to put it in the correct category.
4. That setups the forums. Then I setup 3 questions per forum, each involving a separate page to post, then click done which shows the message, then click on the forum name, and then click to post a new topic. So 12*3*3 pages.  To load the questions.
5. After having typed them up in a separate document for my own sanity, it then took me 40 minutes to input them into the system. I had formatted my document so that it could be trivial for a computer to parse it and upload it in about .4 seconds time.
6. If you input the date incorrectly, it wipes out the entire form and you need to start again. Only true of discussion forums.
7. The date format is very picky about spaces and format.
8. The date format changes based on what you are doing. So I had all the dates in the discussion typed out. I cannot use them for the lessons tool because discussions want 06/08/2010 while the Lessons tool wants Jun 08, 2010
9. The End Date Calendar pop-up does not change to meet the start date if you input the text manually.
10. Each lesson requires a separate page formation.
11. There is a mysterious End Date which the help docs do not say what the functional result is. Does it simply mark an end date on the schedule or does it lock students out of the material?
    **After an experiment, it apparently prevents students from viewing the lesson. Why is that a good thing?
12. Each time I add a module, it has a confirmation page that then requires me to choose to return to the modules or to add content. So 12*3 pages for adding modules.
13. Sorting sections involves going to manage-sort-sort sections-select module-then up/down arrows with no save or back button other than the universal reset button. Unnerving.
14. One of Sakai’s “features” is multiple topics. For example there are discussion forums but there are also forums. There are tests and quizzes vs. tasks, surveys, quizzes (now defunct).  The discussion forum has a lot of nice features, particularly for the instructor. It lacks threading which the other forums tool has. And these tools have different nomenclatures, looks, and conventions. It is a very mixed basket of stuff.
15. For assignments (yes, 11 of them), each one requires selecting the date by drop down–no text entry available. Open, due, accept until (3 dates) and the values do not reflect changes from start date. Ouch.
16. For each week, there are, on average, 6 sections. Each requires 2 or 3 page views (choosing the content type does a page refresh–does that count?).  So approximately 200 pages. Ouch.

I have found that Safari is a bit faster than Firefox in dealing with this site. So I am using that. I also am loving the touch scroll of the magic mouse. A finger swipe to the sides scrolls horizontally while vertical scrolling is as usual. But is so seamless and effortless to use. And with may of the windows, I need to scroll down repeatedly after toggling a button (even though I have plenty of window space, the blocks are designed to not use that space). Oops, more gripes.

That’s enough for now.