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

Introducing Portfolios


Due to the relative complexity of its setup, this book has not covered the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) site type yet. An eportfolio is a set of web pages, perhaps containing attachments, which show who you are and what you have accomplished. Institutions use ePortfolios in numerous ways: they may serve as student resumes or be used to assess the education history of instructors, teaching assistants, or students.

The majority of use cases center around the student. Portfolios have the potential to make the flow of students between different institutions and into employment easier by communicating the skill sets and experience in straightforward online structures. For the most up-to-date information about the OSP, please visit: http://osportfolio.org.

The application designers have designed the Portfolio site from a series of wizards, forms, and resources. A form is the electronic version of a paper form and allows inputs of type text, date, integer (whole numbers), decimal...