An Instructors

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An Instructors Guide to Sakai Presenters Dan
Beeby and Jonah Bossewitch Sakai is an
open-source course management system and a likely
candidate to power CourseWorks 2.0. Sakai is
already in use at a number of institutions, and
as the community strengthens, it could provide
many attractive innovations for educators.
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What Sakai is not
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Sakai a brief history

• Roots in OKI (from MIT)
• Seed funded by Mellon
• Goal to have core schools running by 06
• Four core schools SEPP
• Now Sakai Foundation

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Sakai Today

• Being used at UM, IU, Foothill-De Anza
• Pilots at 30 schools (including CU)
• Releases
• 1.0 (10/04), 2.0 (6/05), 2.1 (12/05), 3.0 (6/06)
• Each release adds new/better tools
• Future tools in new releasesdiscussion board,
  wiki, VITAL, etc.
• More than just software

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A Community Source Project An Ecology
community

• developers
• faculty students
• administrators
• support

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Common Goals of the community

• Educational Culture Values
• Similar challenges (in higher ed)
• Transparency
• The players - Sakai foundation, Sakai board,
  other CU groups

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C is for?

• Course or Content Management System (CMS)
• A Collection of tools
• Collaboration
• Communication
• asd

Rules

• Rules make a tool
• Who creates, changes, approves, delivers?
• How are materials received used?

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Essence of the engagement?

• Comprehensive collection of student work over
  time Portfolio?
• Communication, structured or free form
  Discussion? Chat?
• Course administration/organization Syllabus,
  calendar, announcements?
• Collaboration, sharing work groups? Wiki?

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Tools can be interpreted

• Looks same, functionally different
• vs.
• e.g. Test vs. Survey
• a.k.a. eight different ways to use the same tool

• Looks different, functionally equivalent
• vs.
• e.g. Assignments section vs. syllabus (to deliver
  assignments)
• a.k.a eight ways to do the same thing

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Purposeful Choices

• The tool and rules affect how the tool will be
  used in class
• Autonomy ? group work
• Self-guided ? directed

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Demo

• CW and Sakai sites side-by-side

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Where is this going?

• Constantly growing, improving
• Broad community of adopters
• Interesting new tools, tons of potential
• CW aging (true? Stay tuned)
• Discovery, pilot, testing, adoption?
• Were here to help