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

Live demos


After all your hard work, here is some good news: there are several live Sakai demonstrations scattered across the Internet, where you can get a free account and play around. The advantage is that there is no startup cost in time or effort; the disadvantage, for the adventurous, is that you do not get the opportunity to play around with any of the administration tools. Further, the Sakai instances tend to be slightly older than the currently available demonstration version.

Following is a screenshot of the home page of the rSmart offering. rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com/sakai) provides commercial support and an enhanced Sakai instance with extra tools and some well-thought-out tweaks to the GUI.

rSmart contributes many enhancements back to the community and is an active supporter of the community effort. An rSmart employee, Nate Angell, is currently on the board of directors of the Sakai Foundation.

Live demos tend to be supported by commercial companies like Serensoft, rSmart,...