The University of California has developed a new Gradebook Tool for Sakai. This presentation highlights that tool.

1. Gradebook 2:
A UI Overhaul and New Features
Kirk Alexander, Sakai Program Manager
University of California, Davis

2. Why a new Gradebook
• Simplify the user interface
• Easier Gradebook setup
• More intuitive grading of multiple (selectable)
assignments at once for many students
• New features for large classes
• Extra Credit
• Item Weighting in Categories
• Migration of structure to new sites

3. Key Features
• Enhanced Categories and Weighting
• Add features for large classes
• Spreadsheet style grading
• Drop lowest Scores
• Excuse items per student
• Equal and unequal item weighting
• Extra Credit
• Extra Credit items
• Extra Credit Categories

4. Other Features
• Item level grader comments
• Student View
• Extensive logging of all transactions
• Import/Export via csv
• Import/Export structure as well as grades
• Structure can be imported to copy Gradebook
across sites/systems
• Import eventually to be accessible Site Import

5. Phase II Features (Fall 2009)
• Statistics: percentages, medians, averages, class
ranks, SD
• Permission control by role
• Letter Grading (converts to numeric, fixed scale)
• Visual charts of statistics
• Sub Items (requires structural changes, timing
uncertain)*
• Multiple Gradebooks per site*

6. Technology
• Uses existing 2.5 API’s
• Some additions to Gradebook tables
• Google Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and
GXT (Ext GWT SDK)
• Java based grid controller
• Completely replaces existing UI
• Additional internal tables for performance
enhancements to support faster paging

7. More Information
• See Conference Session Wiki Pages
• Confluence (w/ links to Jira, SVN
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SG2X/Grad
ebook2
• User Testing:
http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/GRBK-225
• Docs: (in development)
http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu:8000/smartsite/ucd-
gateway/Gradebook2Documents.html

8. Long Term Goals
• produce an independent
module/component/project from GB2,
tentatively called "Grade Repository”
• allow arbitrary tagging/marking of any entity,
with hierarchical organization (gradebook,
category, item, sub-item, sub-sub-item, etc.)
• support for multiple graders/grades per student
per item, and multiple gradebooks per site, for
the various projects/tools to store grade data
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9. And now here’s a…
Demonstration
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13. Gradebook2 Summary
We have begun this effort by implementing a new tool that closely mimics the current
tool's basic functionality (support for numeric grades including points and
percentages) with some significant new functionality (extra credit items and
categories, drop lowest grade item, grade item weighting, excuse individual grade
record, etc.) and ease of use improvements and a more flexible and extensible UI
strategy. This tool currently shares data model objects with the old tool, which should
largely address compatibility issues with other existing tools that make use of the
original Gradebook1 to aggregate grades.
At the moment, this new tool runs side-by-side with the existing Gradebook1 project
on a Sakai instance, in order to facilitate pilot rollout of the new tool to a select
number of sites.
This tool (gradebook2) has been largely developed against the 2.5.x Sakai build, but it
is to some extent Sakai-version-agnostic, and with some minor patching of the
appropriate data model objects, our intention is to provide a 2.6 branch in the near
future, and to allow it to run in the 3.0 container as well.
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