WooThemes’ Sensei: A Review

I’ve been a fan of WooThemes for a while now. I generally like their designs for WordPress: they are functional and most have a minimal aesthetic that I find pleasing and functional. They recently have begun developing plugins which seems to have taken their emphasis away from the themes, but when I saw Sensei announced, I knew I had to try it out. What follows is my short review after having used it to teach two courses this summer.

My needs for course management are pretty straightforward, so Sensei seemed like a good fit. It has to align with my current teaching philosophy and practice, and not get in the way too much. What attracted me to Sensei is its asynchronous nature, its WordPress integration, and that its developed by WooThemes.

I didn’t get Sensei when it first launched, but waited to test it for my two fully online summer courses: Digital Humanities and Writing for Digital Media. In my experience with WooThemes, the first release is generally pretty good, but subsequent releases tweak minor details making their products solid. They listen to their users and generally respond quickly to support issues, and these facts keep me a subscriber.

I started with Sensei 1.3.3, and they released two new versions during my semester, so now my site runs 1.3.5. The latest version is 1.3.7, so my WooThemes updater never has truly worked, though I followed the directions for activating my license key. Manual upgrades are not a big deal, but really should be unnecessary.

If you’re familiar with WordPress, setting up courses and lessons is straightforward. First make a course; second, add some lessons. Lessons pretty much work like standard posts, but remember to use an excerpt unless you want the whole lesson to appear in the course’s index page. Perhaps auto excerpts for lessons are in order? You can fill in some lesson information, like how long it should take to complete and its complexity level, and even embed an instructional video. Another potentially cool feature is the ability to set a prerequisite before students can take a particular lesson. This didn’t work for me; more on that below.

Sensei needs a dashboard — a landing place and overview for all content. I should be able to see recently submitted quizzes, newest posts, and course analytics all in one spot. As it stands now, each of these is its own screen, and the navigation is slow and tedious, especially when grading quizzes.

I really like the quiz feature, and WooThemes, with release 1.3, has made them pretty robust. They have a number of question and answer types to choose from, but for the nature of my teaching, short answer and multi-line answer are the best for me. These are set up right from within a lesson’s edit page. I have two gripes with the current implementation of quizzes: notifications and evaluation.

When a student completes a quiz, I should get a notification in some way — perhaps on a missing dashboard, or maybe even a little indicator badge at the top of my WordPress install somewhere. This summer I had 30 students, and having to dig down into the grading menu for two classes and multiple quizzes was cumbersome and time consuming. Surely there’s a better way to see if students have taken a quiz. Quiz submission order seems pretty arbitrary, too. How about an indication when exactly the student submitted the quiz, like date and time? This information is important, especially when a class has weekly due dates.

Speaking of timing: I’d like to have the option of setting a due date. This wouldn’t be as necessary if the date and time of submission was indicated. Along the same lines, there should be a way to control access to quizzes. As it stands, students can view a quiz anytime they want without taking it. Users should have the ability to control the number of quiz attempts and the ability to set a time limit for taking quizzes. Some teachers might not want students to have access to quizzes before they must take them.

Grading is also pretty straightforward, though it could also use some work. First, students must be able to submit marked-up text, using italics and links. And I need to be able to see their submissions this way. Part of online teaching for me means that the students learn integral digital literacies, and this means they must be able to format text correctly, using paragraphs, possessives, quotations, and hypertext. As it stands now, the submissions look terrible, apostrophes and quotation marks look strange, links don’t work, and it really is difficult to grade longer passages. (This might have been fixed in the version 1.3.7, but I have not been able to test it yet.)

Being able to provide feedback on quizzes would also be great. In fact, a cool feature would be having a dossier on each student where I could take notes, give advice, or even upload a PDF grade report.

One of my biggest issues with Sensei this summer was not a Sensei issue at all, but setting up my WordPress install for user logins. I wanted a simple way for students to login to the site. Since Twitter is an important part of all my courses, I thought letting students use their Twitter logins would be a good call, so I installed the WordPress plugin Social Login. It seemed simple enough: it would use the students’ Twitter IDs to make accounts. At first, it seemed to work, but when students returned the next day, it would make them a different account! Say good-bye, then, to some of Sensei’s cool features, like analytics, progress tracking, and prerequisites. I tried to get support from the developer of Social Login, but they are no WooThemes. Don’t do it. Lesson learned here: I guess I’ll just use WordPress’ built-in account creation to avoid these issues this fall. If anyone has another solution, I’d love to hear about it.

Recommendation

In all, if you’re looking for a simple, no-nonsence course management plugin, you could do much worse than Sensei. While it has room for improvement and it won’t fit the needs of all educators, it is far more eloquent than many course management systems I have tried, including Moodle and Desire2Learn which tend to be overkill and much more time consuming to maintain. I think WooThemes should offer a trial period on Sensei; at $99 I had to get my department to purchase it for me. Still, I look forward to successive releases, and I plan to continue to use Sensei this fall.

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What I Liked

• Simple set up
• Works like WordPress
• Asynchronous
• Not overkill on features

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What Needs Work

• Dashboard
• Automatic upgrades
• Quizzes
• Evaluation and feedback

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Notes on Naturalism

A basic tension between head and heart was characteristic of our naturalistic novelists. Their intellectual commitment to scientific determinism and its attendant implications regarding humanity’s place in nature is to be seen in the forms of their works — in explicit and implicit commentary, in character conception, in the use of background, in the dynamics of interaction between character and environment (the conduct of action), and in motif, image, and symbol. Their attempt to render the new deterministic vision in the novel form constitutes what we may call their “positive naturalism.” Inevitably, such an effort issues in what has been called “negative naturalism,” an attack on false values based on non-scientific assumptions. This effect, however, is not simply a quiet or implied corollary of their positive naturalism. Indeed, in many cases the novelists seem at least as interested in toppling the intellectual idols of their fathers as they are in embodying their own bleak new knowledge.

The main objects of their iconoclasm are rational humanism, Christianity, romanticism, the “genteel tradition” (ideality, sentimentalism, respectability, gentility, etc.), the assurances of the editorial pages and the pulpit, and the various components of the American dream. Sometimes the work of denial is conducted sadly, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes with an épater le bourgeois avidity, and sometimes with trenchant irony. But even as they discredit “outmoded” formulas for viewing life in humanly meaningful terms, it is clear that they have not purged their own hearts of that need. In spite of their determinism, as Malcolm Cowley has put it, “The sense of moral fitness is strong in them; they believe in their hearts that nature should be kind, that virtue should be rewarded on earth, that men should control their own destinies.” Both within the forms of their novels and in their effects, the reader discovers a residual humanistic and teleological sensibility at work.

“The Dynamo and the Virgin” — The sublimation of the sexual energy in the form of the Virgin was the power of spirituality in the Middle Ages. This has been superseded with the invention of the Dynamo which Adams sees as representing an amoral force with no laws of cause and effect; a fragmented multiverse with no spirituality. This force has become an end in itself — a potentially destructive force that could easily overwhelm its creators.

The projection of romantic ideals into a naturalistic, indifferent universe is destructive. There is no morality or beauty in this universe ruled, as Henry Adams sees it, by the chaotic, destructive power of the Dynamo, rather than the loving power of the Virgin.

The desire for nature to be benevolent and kind, rewarding the righteous, freedom of choice, and the power to control our own destiny, is still alive, and part of naturalism. The various authors acknowledge the fact of an amoral, indifferent universe, yet lament that it must be so. This view is sometimes represented a the contention between head and heart. The head realizes that the universe is monistic, i.e. of one substance, the physical precluding the spiritual as delusional; the heart pines that it should not be so. If the balance fails and leans toward the desires of the heart then man projects upon the universe what he needs out of it, e.g. anthropomorphic qualities, the control by an almighty God, who is perhaps, like the Deists believed, removed from influence and entreaty, or teleology.

Yet Darwin destroyed any Deist arguments of design with benevolence. He looked for, and discovered, the mechanism of evolution. Struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, was the only law of the universe; this is the amoral law of variation.

Comtis, in his law of the three stages of human thought, traces the development of the human mind:

1. theological — divine causes for everything, this thought is fictitious and deceiving
2. metaphysical — controlling essences within nature rather than divine entities, i.e. de-anthropomorphized
3. positivistic — science would study events and determine why because of milieu.

All move through these phases with sociology being the last. Eventually, through these laws, including Darwinism, a perfection will be reached where only the strongest and most perfect will comprise humanity.

Spencer, similar to Comtis, attributed the development of everything by the universe’s force moving perpetually and persistently through everything. These forces will both culminate in the winnowing out of the weaker, lesser beings in a society. This idea led to Social Darwinism.

Yet, there is a link with the past — always. Humans are the sum of their animal pasts. The primal, animalistic instinct is still lurking within ready to be unleashed with any chance change of circumstances, or milieu. Anyone, at any time, can atavistically relapse into her/his constituent bestial elements.

There is a chance for escape in the reader. The authors of these naturalistic works are depending upon the readers understanding and action to change the circumstances presented by them in their novels. We, the readers, have a weighty responsibility in seeing that there are no more Maggies, Trinas, or McTeagues. Like the scientist, the naturalistic novelist points out the natural laws underlying events so that we will be able to understand them and eventually control them, to some extent, and improve our lives.