Hierarchy at Oxford

1
Hierarchy at Oxford

• Adam Marshall and Matthew Buckett
• University of Oxford

2
Overview

• The problem
• The current solution
• Solving in Sakai
• Demo
• Whats next?
• Technical guff

3
Sakai at Oxford

• Current VLE/LMS is Bodington
• Moving to Sakai
• Pilot 08/09
• Production 09/10
• Bodington decommissioned 11/12
• Must offer equivalent functionality
• Big problem lack of Hierarchy

4
Hierarchy?

• Reflect University structure
• Provides context to material
• Reuse of sites
• Meaningful URLs
• Anonymous access
• Search engine indexing
• Devolved administration
• Bodington supports above.

5
Hierarchy in Sakai

• Resources tool
• File hierarchy
• Can collapse some
• Chucks subsite work
• Ian Bostons work
• Internal tool hierarchies (Evaluations)

6
Chucks Subsite

• Lots of small hierarchies
• Useful for tying courses together
• Not very invasive
• But
• Only presents sites youre a member of
• Not browseable from Gateway site
• No tool support
• No nice URLs
• No site reuse

7
Chucks Subsites
8
Oxford Hierarchy

• Initial development from Ian Boston
• One overarching arrangement of sites
• Sites exist in multiple places in hierarchy
• Meaningful URLs
• Site URLs
• Page Aliases
• Tool Support

9
Hierarchy diagram
Gateway
Colleges
MyWorkspace
Exeter
Sites
ASUC
Help
10
Oxford Hierarchy Demo

• Movie for backup

11
Devolved Admin

• Why? Small central team
• Encourage first level of support to local IT
• Increase self reliance

12
Devolved Admins
Early Medieval English Site
English Admin Site
13
Devolved Admin Demo
14
Technical Implementation

• Skin Changes
• Portal changes
• Hierarchy API
• Site Manage changes
• Sites tool (search)
• Helpers hurt (brittle).

15
Hierarchy Enhancements

• Hierarchy navigation as a tool in site.
• Drag and drop interface for management.
• Other related sites.
• JCR for storage of tree.
• Tabs arent right for parent nodes, anything
  better?

16
What else is possible?

• Search downwards from here
• Different toolset based on position
• Site template based on position
• Inheriting permissions (parent realm)?
• But
• Tools should not be hierarchy aware

17
Further Details

• http//beta.weblearn.ox.ac.uk/ - Pilot Instance
• https//source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/tetraelf/h
  ierarchy/ - Hierarchy code.
• https//svn.oucs.ox.ac.uk/projects/vle/sakai/build
  / - Our build including WL-7 patches and skin
  changes.