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

The tools and structure of a Sakai site


You can think of Sakai as a framework that allows you to create the kind of online experience you want for your students. There is not a single way that a Sakai course site needs to function—it is ultimately up to you, with assistance from your Sakai user support team, to determine how the course is presented to the students online.

Still, there are common ways courses are structured as well as common activities (such as explaining a homework assignment) that take place in most classrooms. This chapter addresses how to best use Sakai to support these structures and activities.

Not all Sakai sites are used for courses. In many institutions, it is common to find Sakai used for research work groups and administrative collaboration. In fact, at many institutions, there are more "collaboration sites", as they are called in the Sakai community, than there are course sites. So, these types of sites are included in the overview.

Many institutions integrate Sakai...