Using Rosters in Sakai

This document explains how to access course rosters. If you already know, you might want to skip down to the section on "known issues".

There are two ways to access the rosters.  When you create a course, or go into "Add Roster" in an existing site, you'll see two options:

Full Roster Integration

We recommend the first option if possible. It gives you full roster integration. To use it, simply check the boxes for the sections you want, and choose   "Continue."

All students on your roster will automatically be in your course. You'll see a complete list of them. However doing this requires your department to authorize you to access the roster. For various reasons some departments don't do that. Thus we have another option.

If you need to remove a student, go to the "Site Info" page, change the "Active" indicator to the right of their name to "Inactive", and hit "Update." When a student comes from the roster, you can't remove them. The problem is that they would come right back the next time Sakai checks with the administrative system. So you have to leave them there but inactivate them. A user who is inactive won't show up anywhere in your course other than the "Site Info" page.

Sakai checks the rosters in real time. However at the moment the database it checks is only updated once a day, early in the morning. So if a student adds your course, he or she should show up in the roster the next morning.

The Workaround

Some people are not able to use full roster integration. Perhaps their department doesn't give faculty roster access. Or perhaps a course is cross-listed with another department. For this reason we provide another approach.

If you click "I want to add..." and then continue, you'll get a second page where you can list one or more courses. You must use the official Rutgers format for course numbers, which is described on that page.

If you use the workaround, students will have to join your course. In fact you will have to go into "Site Access" and check off "Can be joined by anyone with authorization to log in." That is slightly misleading. If you have listed one or more Rutgers course numbers after "I want to add", only students in one of those sections will be able to add your course.

You'll need to tell students to join your course. After logging in, they should go to "Membership," then choose "Joinable Sites" (near the top of the panel). That will list all the sites that they can join. If they are in one of the sections you listed, they will be able to join your site by clicking "join" under the name of the site. You will be able to see all of the students who have joined.

Known Issues

1. Sometimes you have access to rosters, but they don't show up. This will only happen with sites created under the old version. The problem is that you don't have an academic term defined, even though it looks like you have Fall 2005. Choose another term, e.g. Spring 2006. Your rosters will show up. (If they don't show up even then, talk to your department and make sure you are actually authorized.) This is a bug, and will be fixed.

2. If you have a very large course, the main "Site Info" page is very slow. We're not sure why that is. Fortunately other functions that use the roster, such as the gradebook, do not have this slowness.

3. Names in Site Info are oddly alphabetized. We've run out of time to fix this. Fortunately, names shown elsewhere, such as the roster in the Gradebook, are shown as expected.

Previous problems that are fixed:

4. If you go into Gradebook and look at Roster, you may not see all of your students. This has been fixed. Whenever you add or remove a roster from your course, the copy used by gradebook and email is updated. When students add or drop your course, we get the data overnight. All functions within Sakai should be up to date by the start of business.

5. If you drop a section, students will continue to be listed in site info until you add another section. This has been fixed.

6. You can't add more than one section using full roster integration. If you try, you get the confirmation screen several times, and then an error message. This has been fixed.

7. If you have access to rosters for many courses, the "add roster" page is too slow to use. It turns out that it was fetching not just what rosters you have access to, but the list of students for each. That was unnecesary. We've removed it. Add roster should now be fairly quick.

In case you wonder why there are so many issues: The roster system was written at the University of Michigan. They have a very powerful and complex administrative database about courses. For release 2.0 of Sakai, Michigan produced a "generic" version, designed to be customized for other campuses. However they couldn't test it without doing an installation at another campus. We appear to be the first campus outside of Michigan to try full online roster integration. Thus we're finding the problems.