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

Core technologies


You can define Sakai roughly as a series of web applications running in a servlet container with some shared central services. A servlet is a Java object that gets a request from the servlet container — the Tomcat server in this case — and sends a response. The web browser makes a request; an application receives the request, does some work, and then generates a response (normally a web page) that the end user gets to see. Of course, the exact details are more complex; in the case of Sakai, the web browser request goes to an aggregator that dispatches many requests to specific tools, which in turn use services and generate responses. The aggregator then collects the responses to make one view for the end user.

Luckily for Java developers, the architects based the Sakai framework on standard technologies. That was smart: it's easy to find employable developers because the technology is well-known. Just as importantly, at a technical level the servlet container isolates...