Inside the Evolving Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment

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Inside the Evolving Sakai Collaborative Learning
Environment
When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for
everyone telling you you're nuts. - Larry
Ellison, Founder and CEO, Oracle

• Josh Baron
• Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
• Marist College
• Sakai Foundation Board of Directors

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How many arerunning Sakai today?
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How many are piloting or evaluating Sakai?
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How many came because you thought there would
berice wine and sushi? ?
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Presentation Overview

• What is Sakai? A view from 10,000 feet
• The CLE Software
• The Community
• The Foundation
• Why Sakai? Driving Innovation
• Sakai Myth vs. Reality
• New Initiatives and Directions
• QA (Please ask as we go)

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What is Sakai?
Remind me at the end and Ill tell you where the
name comes from ?
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What is Sakai?
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The CLE Software
Courses
Portfolios
Projects
My Workspace
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Sakai Demonstration

• Be Kind, Dont Hog the Wi-Fi! ?

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Close to 50 additional contrib tools
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Synchronous conferencing
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Image Gallery Tool
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SOLO Offline Sakai
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Sakaibrary Library integration
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Timeline Tool
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What is Sakai?
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The Sakai Community
Over 160 Production and140 Pilot Instances on 7
continents
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Sakai Commercial Affiliates
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An Enterprise Solution (or not)
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Increasing Number of Committers
December 2006 (n116)
April 2008 (n225)
94 increase in 16 months
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What is Sakai?
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The Foundation

• Community source builds upon the open source
  production and development models but introduces
  more formal commitments and coordination to the
  work and strategic directions.
  (http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_source)
• Protects open-source license
• Manages Sakai Partners Program
• 100 members
• Coordination and facilitation
• Staff coordinate work within the community
• Host yearly conference and regular meetings
• External communication

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Why Sakai? Driving Innovation

• Built by educators, for educators
• Bottom line is not a profit-margin
• Crowd-sourcing The human collective
• 5 Foundation staff
• 225 developers 500 active contributors
• 10,000 instructors 1,000,000 students
• Communities of practice powerful PD opts!
• Decoupling code from the service
• Open standards support interoperability
• IMS Course Cartridge, QTI

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Sakai Myth vs. Reality

• Sakai is only for large research institution
• You need lots of developers to maintain Sakai
• Its free, right?
• No license costs but it isnt free
• ROI investing in human capital vs. licensing fees
• A bunch of volunteer cant build anything useful!
• What about Linux? Apache? Your local FD?
• Robust software engineering process followed
• Using OSS without commercial support is crazy!
• What myths have you heard?

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Institutional Resource Snapshot
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New Initiatives Directions

• Teaching and Learning Group
• Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award
• OpenEdPractices.org
• Yearly international conference
• Sakai 2009 Possibly Boston
• Regional meetings and hackathons
• Cambridge (July 08)
• Berkley Virginia Tech (Fall 08)
• K-12 Sakai Conference (RINET)
• User Experience Initiative

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What might the future look like?
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Where to learn more

• Home http//www.sakaiproject.org
• Issues http//bugs.sakaiproject.org
• Collab http//collab.sakaiproject.org
• Wiki http//bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence
• Michael Korcuska, Executive Director,
  mkorcuska_at_sakaifoundation.org
• Anthony Whyte, Community Liaison,
  arwhyte_at_sakaifoundation.org

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Inside the Evolving Sakai Collaborative Learning
Environment

• Josh Baron
• Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
• Josh.Baron_at_marist.edu
• [phone]