Book Image

Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Book Image

Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Overview of this book

This book is the officially endorsed Sakai guide. From setting up and running Sakai for the first time to creatively using its tools, this book delivers everything you need to know. Written by Alan Berg, Senior developer at the IC (http://www.ic.uva.nl) and a Sakai fellow and Michael Korcuska, the executive director of the Sakai Foundation, and with significant contributions from the Sakai community, this book is a comprehensive study of how Sakai should be used, managed and maintained. Sakai represents a Collaboration and Learning environment that provides the means of managing users, courses, instructors, and facilities, as well as a spectrum of tools including assessment, grading, and messaging. Sakai is loaded with many handy software tools, which help you in online collaboration. You can improve your coursework using features that supplement and enhance teaching and learning. You can use tools that will help you organize your communication and collaborative work. The book opens with an overview that explains Sakai, its history and how to set up a demonstration version. The underlying structures within Sakai are described and you can then start working on Sakai and create your first course or project site using the concepts explained in this book. You will then structure online courses for teaching and collaboration between groups of students. Soon after mastering the Administration Workspace section you will realize that there is a vast difference between the knowledge that is required for running a demonstration version of Sakai and that needed for maintaining production systems. You will then strengthen your concepts by going through the ten real-world situations given in this book. The book also discusses courses that have won awards, displays a rogue's gallery of 30 active members of the community, and describes what motivates management at the University of Amsterdam to buy into Sakai. Finally, the executive director of the Sakai Foundation looks towards the future.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Sakai Courseware Management
Credits
Foreword
About the authors
About the reviewers
Preface
20
Endwords
Glossary

Interview with Sakai 3 chief architect


The following is an interview with Ian Boston, Chief Technology officer of the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the University of Cambridge (CARET). Ian holds a first degree in Engineering and a PhD in parallel computing. As CTO at CARET, Ian has been deeply involved with Sakai, as well as other community source projects such as Kuali Student. He is leading development of the new kernel (K2) for Sakai 3. Ian was awarded one of the first Sakai Fellowships, and speaks regularly at open source conferences and events around the world.

In this interview, we ask him about his perspective on the evolution of Sakai.

Who are you and what is your role within the Sakai community?

  • I became involved in Sakai at the start due to a research project at the University of Cambridge that needed to extend the capabilities of Sakai. Since then I have become more involved dealing with the build systems, performance, and optimization of content hosting...