Book Image

Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Book Image

Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Overview of this book

Sakai is a Collaboration and Learning environment that provides the means to manage users, courses, instructors, and facilities, as well as a spectrum of tools including assessment, grading, and messaging. Sakai is loaded with many handy features and tools, which make it uniquely the Learning system of the present as well as the future.This book is the officially endorsed Sakai guide and is an update to the previous book, Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide. From setting up and running Sakai for the first time to creatively using its tools and features, this book delivers everything you need to know.Written by Alan Berg, a Sakai fellow and former Quality Assurance Director of the Sakai Foundation and Ian Dolphin the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation with significant contributions from the Sakai community, Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide is a comprehensive study of how Sakai CLE should be used, managed, and maintained, with real world examples and practical explanations.The book opens with an overview of Sakai, its history and how to set up a demonstration version. Next, the underlying structures and tools are described. In using Sakai for Teaching and Collaboration, there is a detailed discussion of how to structure online courses for teaching and collaboration between groups of students, from creating course sites to understanding their use in different organizations around the world.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Sakai CLE Courseware Management
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Terminology
Index

Introduction


This chapter discusses the challenges and great advantages of Sakai as a community source project at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA, http://www.uva.nl). Like all universities, this is not a standard institution with standard requirements.

The competitiveness of modern universities is measured by the value of their online services. Online courses offered 24/7 are the norm and not the exception. The current Learning Management System (LMS) at UvA is designated mission-critical. If the LMS fails, the daily lives of the students and of the authors of this chapter are significantly affected.

Note

LMS, CMS, VLE, VRE, and CLE

When you read the international journals, you can see some nearly interchangeable terms: Learning Management System (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and if you are a researcher, Virtual Research Environment (VRE). Sakai is a Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), which is an LMS with extra features that support...