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

Core tools in Sakai 2.6


Not all core Sakai tools are part of every user's experience with Sakai. In addition to the common end user tools that are easily found in most Sakai sites, a number of administrative tools have reached core status. In addition, Sakai's ePortfolio system, the bundle of tools collectively known as OSP (for "open source portfolio"), is also part of the Bundle. Some organizations deploy Sakai without OSP tools and some organizations deploy OSP without using the other tools in Sakai. The table below lists the end user tools for Sakai 2.6.

Tool

Common Name

Purpose

Announcements

sakai.announcements

For the posting of current, time-critical information

Assignments

sakai.assignment.grades

For posting, submitting, and grading assignment(s) online

Calendar Summary

sakai.summary.calendar

For calendar summary information

Chat Room

sakai.chat

For real-time conversations in written form

Drop Box

sakai.dropbox

For private file sharing between instructor and...