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

Chapter 8. Putting Sakai to Work

The fundamental determinants of course quality have always been (and will remain), the course content, the instructor(s), the learning activities in which the students are engaged, and the students themselves.

We do not make any exaggerated promises about the transformative nature of technology in education. Technology, Sakai or otherwise, can be used to improve your course by allowing you and your students to do things that might have been impractical without the technology, or by reducing the amount of time spent on administrative issues. However, the tools Sakai provides are just tools, and unless they are used purposefully, they will not make much of a difference. Therefore, it is most important for you to consider what you want to accomplish with your students and how the capabilities Sakai provides can support the course activities.

There is no such thing as a "best" way of teaching. What works in a small graduate seminar in philosophy may not work in...