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 community


In a wider sense, Sakai is not only an application, but also an active community of educational institutions working together to solve common problems and share best practices. The professional development and cross-institutional knowledge sharing are benefits that are hard to find elsewhere.

The vibrant, open source community has structured management and strong commercial support. The central pillar is the Sakai Foundation (http://sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-Foundation).

Sakai is open sourced under the Educational Community License, currently version 2 (http://opensource.org/licenses/ecl2.php). This allows commercial partners to provide hosting, support, and custom modifications, and lets developers work with the full code base. A proprietary license would have slowed down deployment and held back development and wider support.

The benefit of open source for the assessment of quality is profound. You can handle and manipulate the code without having to worry about accidentally violating any commercial license, advanced developers can learn through review, and issues and bugs are more amenable to resolution locally.

The Sakai open source community is confident, open, and not afraid to show the good, the bad, or the ugly. An Amsterdam University-based QA server automatically tests the main parts of the source code for bugs three times a day and publishes at the end of each test a report (http://qa1-nl.sakaiproject.org/codereview) that is viewable by the whole universe and a couple of parallel ones as well. Anyone can download the source code and send modifications to a branch manager.

Branches

Different organizations have different timelines for patching and updating their production servers. The source code of Sakai is evolving fast and, once or twice a year, the Foundation releases a new version of Sakai. Some organizations do not have the time or resources to upgrade, but do want to patch their servers for known bugs and security issues. To achieve this, the branch manager copies the source code into another part of the source code repository (this is called branching). The branch manager for the older code is responsible for updating with patches, leaving the newer code in a different branch to evolve.

Being a branch manager is quite a lot of work and it is easy to make mistakes. If you see one of this endangered species at a conference, pat him or her on the back, make encouraging noises, and try not to look at his or her greying hair and the stress lines in his or her face.

Workgroups

Workgroups are factions of similarly interested parties that gather information and requirements on Confluence and share advice and best practices with the community. Visit the main page of the Sakai Confluence (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/dashboard.action) and you will see a list of workgroups mixed in with other links on the left side. The workgroups meet online and, usually at conferences, in person. Workgroups exist for developers, quality assurance, management of the software life cycle, the user experience, teaching practices, and so on.

The email lists from the various workgroups are also viewable to the world and there are no limits on who can subscribe. A wiki is in place with a large number of contributors changing content without central editorial control. In general, the community responds quickly.

Note

A full list of workgroups with descriptions is given as part of Chapter 17.

Note

The official Sakai FAQ

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27807 is very readable and is a good jumping off point for further study. It contains many useful and up-to-date links as well.

Developers

The architects have not just designed Sakai to be a place for excellent online learning experiences; it is also a platform for easy development, especially of tools. At least 100 developers are actively enhancing Sakai directly or through contributions for local deployments right now. That's a rather large number, so you can expect rapid evolution of the product base.

Tool creation is straightforward; most developers within the Sakai community use the industrial standard Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org) to bash away at their code.

For tool builders, at first development may seem daunting. However, the basic skills needed to create a tool are the same as those for building a standard web application. Thankfully, there is a wide range of supportive material in the wild.

It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the detail of setting up your development environment.

Note

Tool creation

For those of you who are interested in tool creation, the online Development Environment Setup document (http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BOOT/Development+Environment+Setup+Walkthrough) is a necessary read.