The Sakai Project

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The Sakai Project

• University of Michigan
• Indiana University
• Stanford University
• MIT
• JA-SIG (uPortal) OKI

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SAKAI Proposal

• U Michigan, Indiana U, MIT, Stanford, uPortal
• Awarded 2-year Mellon Foundation funding
• Build on JSR 168, OKI standards
• CHEF 2.0 as framework and services
  implementations
• uPortal as 168-compliant portal
• Distributed development of tools portable code
• Tool Portability Profile (TPP) as part of grant
• Goal interchangeable tools and components built
  at
• different places all working together

3
Hiroyuki Sakai
Iron Chef French
(Synchronized Architecting of Knowledge
Acquisition Infrastructure)
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Sakai Project Core Universities

• Commitments
• 5 developers/architects, etc. under project
  leadership no local responsibility for 2 years
• Public commitment to implement Sakai
• Open/Open licensing
• Project
• 4.4M in institutional staff (27 FTE)
• 2.4M Mellon Foundation
• Additional investment through partners

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Contributions

• University of Michigans CourseTools (CTNG) and
  Work Tools (WTNG) for group collaboration (from
  the CHEF project)
• Indiana Universitys Navigo Assessment, Oncourse
  Course Management System, Eden Workflow, and
  OneStart enterprise portal
• MITs Stellar Course Management and
  Administration System OKI OSIDs
• Stanfords CourseWork Course Management System,
  Navigo development
• JA-SIGs uPortal

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Sakai Project Deliverables

• Tool Portability Profile
• Specifications for writing portable software
• Pooled intellectual propertybest of
• JSR-168 portal
• Course management system
• Quizzing and assessment tools, etc
• Research collaboration system
• Workflow engine
• modular pre-integrated
• Synchronized adoptions at Michigan, Indiana, MIT,
  Stanford with open-open licensing

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Sakai Core Project
Activity Maintenance Transition from
aproject to a community

• Michigan
• CHEF Framework
• CourseTools
• WorkTools
• Indiana
• Navigo Assessment
• Eden Workflow
• OneStart
• Oncourse
• MIT
• Stellar
• Stanford
• CourseWork
• Assessment

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Open/Open Licensing

• ..all work products under the scope of the
  Sakai initiative for which a member is counting
  matching contribution and any Mellon Sakai
  funding will be open source software and
  documentation licensed for both education and
  commercial use without licensing fees.

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Sakai Community Support

• Developer and adopter support
• Sakai Educational Partners Program (more
  below)
• Commercial support
• No exclusive deals talk with everyone
• Open-open licensing open source, open for
  commercialization
• For fee services will probably include
• Installation/integration, On-going support,
  Training

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Sakai Educational Partners Program

• Fee 10k per year, 3 years
• Access to SEPP staff
• Community development manager
• SEPP developers, documentation writers
• Knowledgebase
• Developer training for the TPP
• Exchange for partner-developed tools
• Strategy and implementation workshops
• Early access to pre-release code

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SEPP Support

• Developers to provide technical support for
  partners and liaison with the Sakai Core
  development team,
• Support tools of immediate and specific interest
  to partners, such as a shared knowledgebase,
• Technical documentation and specifications,
• Administrative Support person to aid SEPP staff
  members and partners.

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SAKAI Partners

• institutions of higher education, both large
  and small participating in the Sakai Project in
  ways that suit their local needs and timing.
  These may include
• contributing to funding the project to ensure an
  open source option for higher education,
• participating in the discussion of strategic
  directions for the Sakai Project
• developing educational tools based on Sakais
  Tool Portability Profile, and/or
• adopting Sakai Project software at their
  institution.

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SEPP Objectives (1of 3)

• The objectives of the Educational Partners
  Program are to
• actively develop a large, self-sustaining
  community of institutions that share the Sakai
  Projects open source vision
• carry on a discussion of strategic directions for
  the Sakai Project as it emerges and evolves,
• provide a Sakai Project roadmap describing the
  timing and features for Sakai software releases,

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SEPP Objectives (2 of 3)

• provide in depth developer and adopter training,
• develop a leveraged support infrastructure of a
  common (or locally implemented) knowledgebase,
  and helpdesk
• mobilize distributed resources for development
  and support of Sakai tools,
• provide a marketplace for the sharing and
  exchange of Sakai-based tools/components,
• facilitate purposeful interaction with the Sakai
  Core development team,

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SEPP Objectives (3 of 3)

• coordinate activities with other organizations,
  such as IMS or country-level agencies,
• build on the experiences of the JA-SIG, CHEF, and
  OKI training and conferences,
• facilitate Sakai community sharing of best
  practices in development, implementation, and
  support.

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SEPP Meetings

• The initial SEPP meetings are planned for June
  and September of 2004.
• The semi-annual SEPP meetings will have a
  technical track for training software developers
  and implementers and an administrative track for
  Sakai strategy and user support.
• Partners may send two developers to each meeting
  for formal training in the Sakai Tool Portability
  Profile by the lead technical staff of the Sakai
  Project.

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What Can Be Done Now - Look At

• www.sakaiproject.org
• uPortal (www.ja-sig.org)
• JSR 168
• Chef (www.chefproject.org)
• OKI (web.mit.edu/oki)
• J2EE/EJB/JBoss
• Tools wont be built this way, wont even see
  EJBs
• Services should be built this way
• Clustering, scaling, caching, cache coherency
  rely on entity beans
• Avalon, Spring, Pico
• Inversion of Control models
• Levels 1,2, 3
• Loader models

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What should we be doing here at UVa?

• Start a regular series of discussions
• Become familiar with the various pieces and
  technologies in the Sakai project
• Get plugged into the Sakai project
• Start planning how to take advantage of Sakai
• Assess existing Toolkit functionality versus
  Sakai, e.g., what to keep, what to replace
• Start designing the ToolkitNG based on Sakai
• Envision and design the larger MyUVa that
  includes ToolkitNG

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MITs Stellar
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Stanfords CourseWork
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uPortal
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Indianas OnCourse
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Michigans CTNG
Sites are accessed via their tab
Foreign Language support
Synoptic views
Customizable page menu
Presence
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Michigans WTNG
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Michigans WTNG
More examples chat, lab notebook, schedule, web
page
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Tool Portability Profile

• The Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) OSIDs OKI
  Service Interface Definitions
• The JSR-168 portlet specification
• Built into Michigans CHEF and
• JA-SIGs uPortal
• User interface abstraction for localization

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uPortal talks to portlets, aka tools, across the
JSR 168 interface, aggregates their content, and
presents their content to users.
uPortal
JSR 168 Portal
CHEF Provides the place for the tools to run, the
services, and communication between them.
CHEF
JSR 168 Portlet Container
Tools use the services (storage, notification,
workflow, ) made available to them by the
framework.

Tool aka portlet
Tool aka portlet
Tool aka portlet
Tool aka portlet
Services OKI, CHEF implementations/extensions
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JSR-168 Instant Tutorial

• JSR-168 leverages the Servlet API anything
  Servlet references, JSR168 just adopted
• The concepts of actions and context are there
  (basic MVC with some separation of logic and
  presentation)(enough C that you can do MV
  separately)
• Great support for JSP as rendering language, or
  the portlet could choose to call Velocity or XSLT
  to do the rendering.
• The API is very rich and solves many of the
  complicated problems of living inside of a
  portal.
• WSRP and JSR-168 are well aligned (i.e. remote
  and local portlets will play well together)
• There is a Jakarta project to develop JSR-168
  middleware (Pluto)
• Pluto does not implement a portal it can be
  used by many portals, thats the portlet
  container concept, and one of the main points of
  168
• So, we really like JSR 168

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Some Standards

• OKI services interfaces
• JSR 168 portals, portlet containers
• SCORM looking for someone to build portlet,
  service interchange format - zipformat,
  manifest, etc runtime environment - pop-up frame
  set, database-persistent scratch space island?
  Out of band agreements need to be codified for
  integration into Sakai
• LOM Looking at it, like IMS standards
• IMS where applicable, like QTI for assessment
• Increasingly coordinated with OKI efforts
  what/how
• Emerging effort for common architectures
• XML/XSLT - sure, as part of, say, QTI spec, or
  for display rendering
• RDF of increasing interest to Chef team stay
  tuned

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Chef Project

• Encompasses CT.NG, WT.NG, NeesGrid, NMI, other
  users of Chef
• Is the core software development effort
• Providing framework for tools that go to make up
  the other offerings, eg, CTNG, WT.NG,
  DissertationTool (cTools)
• We are currently running Chef 1.2 for CT.NG
• Chef 2.0 is foundation for Sakai

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CourseTools.NG ? SAKAI Tools

• Administration
• User presence
• Schedule
• Announcements
• Resources
• Assignments
• Discussion
• eMail Archive
• Dropbox

• Chat
• News (RSS)
• Webpage Tool
• Synopsis
• Notification
• Anonymous comment
• Public view
• WebDav
• Search

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Gateway to CTNG supports non authorized view of
sites, general info about the application
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Sites tool non-authorized users can see site
content designated as Public
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Each user has their own private worksite My
Workspace
Personal tool list for user, customizable
create, edit, configure worksites join sites
summary of sites announcements, schedule
private resources RSS feeds, links to web
pages
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Example summary in My Workspace schedules from
all sites in which you are a member
From the Educ 100 site
From the Sample site
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Various views Recurring events Custom fields
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Hierarchy of folders Optional permissions by role
on folders
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Resources accessible via WebDav Drag/drop
to/from CTNG resources
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Multiple layout options Threaded, star
formats Categories, topics for organization
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Open, Due, Close date control Inline,
attachments, both for submissions Return for
resubmission, review
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Instructor view creating an assignment
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Student view creating a submission
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Instructors view
Students view
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Multiple chat rooms via Options
Users present In Chat
Presence users focused on site
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Email Archive of all email sent to the
site Users preferences control how they receive
email none, as they come in, digest
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News tool display any RSS feed
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Web content tool display any URL
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Permissions per role can be set per tool Support
can add additional roles
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Permissions per folder per role can be adjusted
Let Students post files to this folder
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The OKI Initiative

• The Open Knowledge Initiative is a collaboration
  among leading universities and specification and
  standards organizations to support innovative
  learning technology in higher education. 
• The result of this collaboration is an open and
  extensible architecture that specifies how the
  components of an educational software environment
  communicate with each other and with other
  enterprise systems. O.K.I. provides a modular
  development platform for building both
  traditional and innovative applications while
  leveraging existing and future infrastructure
  technologies.
• O.K.I. is designed for broad adoption in the
  higher education domain. It provides a stable,
  scalable base that supports the flexibility
  needed by higher education and commercial
  developers of educational software.

http//web.mit.edu/oki/
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The OSIDs

• Common Services
• Authentication
• Authorization
• SQL
• Logging
• Shared
• Filing
• Dictionary
• Hierarchy
• Group
• ID
• User Messaging
• Scheduling
• Workflow

• Domain Specific Services
• Educational Services
• Course Management
• Digital Repository
• Assessment
• Grading

http//sourceforge.net/projects/okiproject
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Existing Campus Infrastructure elements that Map
to OSIDs

• Authentication/Authorization
• Enterprise File Systems
• Data Warehouses
• Student Information Systems
• Digital Libraries/Educational Content
  Repositories
• Unique ID/Campus Namespace Systems
• Group Management Systems
• Enterprise Calendaring Systems
• Enterprise Workflow Systems
• Email, Chat, Discussion Systems

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OKI - What Can be Done Now?

• Enterprise systems developers/managers should
  familiarize themselves with Version1.0rc6.1 of
  the O.K.I. OSIDs
• http//sourceforge.net/projects/okiproject
• All the JavaDoc, Developer Docs, Reference Docs,
  Solutions Guides as well as reference code and
  other developer aids can be found there.

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OKI - What Can be Done Now?

• Begin developing implementations of appropriate
  OSIDs to integrate with campus systems
• The O.K.I team and others actively scan and
  respond to issues that are raised on the
  SourgeForge OKI project forums. Developers
  should be encouraged to post questions/issues/grip
  es/etc.

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OKI - What Can be Done Now?

• In many cases there will be opportunities for
  institutional collaboration, especially where
  common technologies are in use
• LDAP/Kerberos etc. for AuthN
• PeopleSoft for Student Information Data
• CorporateTime/Meeting Maker/etc.
• AFS for campus file systems
• Etc

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Sakai Educational Partners Program

• Initially the SEPP can provide developer training
  opportunities as well as help in coordinating
  common OSID implementation efforts across member
  institutions.

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Chef What Can Be Done Now?

• http//Chefproject.org
• Source code
• Developer docs
• Installation docs
• Run it
• Look inside

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uPortal What Can Be Done Now?

• http//www.ja-sig.org/
• Source code
• Developer docs
• Installation docs
• Run it
• Look inside

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Sakai Educational Partners Program

• What can be done now? Join. So you can
• Get access to early docs, knowledge base
• Get invited to June and September meetings to
• Get developer training on Sakai
• Learn about, give input on development directions
• Learn about, give input on strategic directions
• Build the HigherEd open source community