The Goal Aware Data point Tool and web service integration with Blackboard
The School of Education is piloting the Open Source Portfolio software. This is the second semester in which we have run version 2.0 of the software. Student portfolio reviews are less than 10% of the assessment data points collected about students’ performance. The bulk of the data points are faculty ratings of student’s coursework and field assessment data.
One approach to building gathering assignment performance data is to build them all in Sakai. We developed the Goal Aware Assignment Tool to allow faculty to create assignments, relate them to the school’s proficiencies and then rate students’ work against those proficiencies.
Syracuse University’s centrally supported courseware system is Blackboard. While the School of Education has run an in-house developed courseware system for about 5 years (the Dialogue Project), we recognize that we are duplicating a lot of what is now done in Blackboard. Our modified Sakai assignment tool, while it performs its intended purpose well, is invading on Blackboard’s courseware turf. Rather than duplicating what Blackboard does well, we would like to extend its capabilities to conform to our new requirements.
We are considering building a simple data collection tool that allows faculty (or the program coordinator) to establish a series of data points for each class. The data points would be associated to goals in much the same manner that the assignment tool allows goals to be associated to assignments. The faculty would then login and add his or her ratings to those data points for each student. Faculty could use either the goal aware assignment tool or Blackboard to manage their classroom activities. The data point tool would allow those faculty using Blackboard to enter their data into the same system as everyone else.
An extension of this idea would be to integrate these tools using web services. We will explore the feasibility of making this integration possible with:
A web services publishing component to our Goal Manager tool
and
A Blackboard Building Block that:
One approach to building gathering assignment performance data is to build them all in Sakai. We developed the Goal Aware Assignment Tool to allow faculty to create assignments, relate them to the school’s proficiencies and then rate students’ work against those proficiencies.
Syracuse University’s centrally supported courseware system is Blackboard. While the School of Education has run an in-house developed courseware system for about 5 years (the Dialogue Project), we recognize that we are duplicating a lot of what is now done in Blackboard. Our modified Sakai assignment tool, while it performs its intended purpose well, is invading on Blackboard’s courseware turf. Rather than duplicating what Blackboard does well, we would like to extend its capabilities to conform to our new requirements.
We are considering building a simple data collection tool that allows faculty (or the program coordinator) to establish a series of data points for each class. The data points would be associated to goals in much the same manner that the assignment tool allows goals to be associated to assignments. The faculty would then login and add his or her ratings to those data points for each student. Faculty could use either the goal aware assignment tool or Blackboard to manage their classroom activities. The data point tool would allow those faculty using Blackboard to enter their data into the same system as everyone else.
Conceptual diagram of goal aware Bb Assignment tool. The arrows in this case represent web service data flow.
A web services publishing component to our Goal Manager tool
and
A Blackboard Building Block that:
- receives a published goal list
- allows a user to associate goals wth Blackboard assignments
- allows a user to rate students’ work against the associated goals
- publishes the student ratings as a web service back to the Sakai data point tool.