We are considering building an add-on to the Uploader to allow the user to easily add metadata and perhaps tags during the upload process.
Course content upload in the beginning of the term
The semester starts in 3 weeks and Catalina is going to spend this Sunday getting the bulk of her course content on the class website. She's got a lot of her material pulled together already from previous semesters. On Sunday she gets up early. She likes to do large uploads to the course site then when there is less traffic on the site and the uploads seem to go faster.
She logs into her course site, goes to the resource area and creates 5 new folders: Syllabus, Homework & Exams, Readings, Lab.
She's going to start with last year's set of assignments. She grabs all the assignments from last year and uploads them to her new course site. She'll have to update some of them for this semester but she can do that later. She'll also have to go back and rename each of the files for how she wants the titles displayed to students.
[NOTE: We may want to create an add-on for the Uploader that allows her to easily batch change names on upload rather than as a separate step after uploading. We can make it a very efficient process and it is a more natural process than uploading and going into each to edit. We could include other kinds of highly used metadata of even notification that make sense for batch uploading. Sakai currently allows for setting a filename and display name on upload]
Catalina is taken back to the Resources tool with her new files in view. Currently it could be a painful process to rename these each individually (see note above).
Now that the base is uploaded, she'll continue to refine her course content over the next few weeks before she publishes it to students. For now, it's off for brunch with a friend.