What's New in Sakai 2.6?
Sakai 2.6 was deployed on August 18, 2009. This release offers a few major architectural changes but is primarily composed of bug fixes. Functional changes include:
| "View As" Feature | Instructors and Organizers can temporarily change to other roles in a course or project site
without logging into Sakai using another account with a different role. Note: Instructors may still want to have a second account with another role to facilitate site development. |
| Session Timeout Warning | A Sakai login session will last one hour. In Sakai 2.6, you will receive a warning five minutes before the hour with a prompt asking if you wish to keep the session alive. |
| My Workspace: Tabs | You can specify the number of site navigation tabs that will be visible to you when you log in to Sakai@UD. More info. |
| Group Creation | There are new default groups based on sections and roles and also new ways to make groups. Instructors can put an entire section into one group just by clicking a button. Also you can make a group consisting of those with a certain role, like instructors and TAs. More info. |
| Assignments: Multiple Submission | Instructors can allow unlimited or a certain number of re-submissions of an assignment up to the due date without having to return the submission to the student each time. More info. |
| Assignments: Custom Fields | Instructors can add sample answers or private notes as well as custom fields to an assignment. |
| Assignments: Custom viewing | Instructors can specify a date range for viewing assignments and specify who can see them (all students, all instructors, etc). For example, Instructors can post supplemental materials, like an attachment only the TAs could see, etc. More info. |
| Gradebook: Add Multiple Items With One Click. | Instructors who wish to use many Gradebook columns can add multiple "New items" and then submit. |
| Tests & Quizzes: Group Awareness | Group awareness provides instructors with the ability to release a test to specific sections (e.g., Honors or groups), allowing different tests/quizzes to be given to different groups. More info. |
| Tests & Quizzes: Published Assessments | Some assessment settings can be changed AFTER the assessment is published. If you remove a published assessment, it is removed from the Gradebook. More info. |
| User Interface Upgrades | Unpublished sites will now be clearly identified above the menubar on the left side of the screen. Tool option buttons have also been made more visible. |
| Schedule: iCal Integration | This new feature provides a way to subscribe to calendars. You can
subscribe to Sakai calendars from other calendar systems,
like Google, (see your Sakai calendar in Google), you can see your (public) Google calendar in a Sakai course,
and you can add other iCal-aware calendars, like the UD academic calendar.
More info Note: Sakai does not show events that do not have a time—which is most of the events on the UD academic calendar. We are looking into a way to make this work. |
