Using Groups in Forums

Using Groups in Forums


Many faculty need to find a way to divide discussion into smaller units. The best method to do this is to use the groups feature. Groups are established by selecting "Manage Groups" under the Site Info tool. Here, select "create new group", on the next page choose a title, a description (if needed), and choose the students to add to the group by selecting the name in the box and pressing the > button to move them into the active box.

Once the groups have been created, move to the forums tool to create new discussion topics for the specific student groups. As you can see from the example below, a discussion topic has been created for each of the student groups. You can establish discussion topics for your groups with whichever titles you choose, whether that be groups names, discussion topics for each group, or some other organizational method. However, you must create a discussion topic for a particular group because threads within each topic will not allow specific permission levels to be set. As we see from the example, the instructor has chosen to organize the discussion topics under the auto-generated "HTS2821 12SP" forum. If you would like to create a new forum for group-specific discussions, you may do so by creating that forum, and then creating the discussion topics for the individual group. In most cases, however, the default forum will be adequate.

When creating discussion topics for each group, the option to limit participants to a specific group is found under the permissions section of the settings. You must first select the role whose permission settings you wish to change, then change the permission level in the drop down below.  In the top drop down box, first select the "student" role from the list, and in the drop down below this select "none." This will restrict access from the general student roster.

Next, select the respective group you wish to give access to the discussion thread from the top drop down, and select "contributor" from the drop down below.

Repeat these steps in while creating the discussion topics for each of the groups, and you now have a customized, group-specific discussion thread for your students.

Upload New Version

Upload New Version: My Workspace Files

One of the nice features of the Sakai interface is the ability to re-upload a document in exactly the same location as a previous version. This works extremely well for two particular applications.

First, we have recommended to our faculty that they try to always store course files and official documents related to classes in well organized folders under the resources of their personal workspaces (My Workspace). This adds the security of having one official copy always available online, accessible from anywhere they have internet access, constantly backed up for security, easily moved into new courses, and - with "Upload New Version" - easy to update.

Using the action drop down, one can select to upload a new version of any file in the list of items within a folder. A very common application of this in My Workspace resources will be syllabi. Each time a course syllabus changes, one can upload a new version directly into the same location as the old syllabus. This will keep the syllabus item in that particular course folder current. **As always, we recommend uploading all document for courses in pdf format. This will guarantee that no editing or changing of the document will accidentally happen as a student opens of reads it.

To summarize, the workflow looks like this:

1) Open the original syllabus document on your machine

2) Edit the document and save

3) Save (or print) the document as a pdf version

4) Upload New Version of the document in place of the existing pdf on Sakai.**

5) Done


 Upload New Version: Dropbox Files

The second highly useful employment of this feature is in the case of grading items in the dropbox. Keep in mind, if you are using the Assignments tool to release assignments and grade them, you will not need to use the "Upload New Version" feature because you can simply add and the graded copy as an attachment when you grade the student's work (see right).

However, in the dropbox, submissions are dropped in manually, and the grading for these submissions is entered manually. Therefore, there is no dialogue box within which to return the graded submission, nor a place to enter comments on the graded work. This must all be handled manually. For this reason, "Upload New Version" is a brilliant tool. The workflow operates the same way as outlined above. One can open a student submission in the drop box, track changes and grade the submission, save a local copy to her/his computer and re-upload using "Upload New Version." The will only see the same document in the same location (including url) only, after you have uploaded after grading, Sakai will indicate that it was uploaded by you, the professor.

Admittedly, this is not quite as refined a process as was the case for Sharepoint. Surely, many of you will miss the ability to open the file directly from Sharepoint, make your edits and comments, and save the file directly back to Sharepoint. I will miss it too. However, the extra steps to save the file, make corrections, save it again and upload a new version actually make the process safer with data handling than the former Sharepoint option.

A Word of Caution: File Formats

**Remember, because you are presumably uploading the same document, just in a revised form, you want to be very sure to upload the same file format. In other words, do not upload a Word docx file as a new version of a pdf (or vice versa). If you try that, you'll get some form of this:

In the case of student papers in dropbox, this will not be a very big issue. The files will (hopefully) be submitted in word format, you will open them in word format, and you will save and re-upload them in the same format. No problem. The issue is more pronounced when it comes to the syllabi. You will need to remember to save your Word-created syllabi into pdf format before re-uploading the file to replace the current pdf version on Sakai.