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

How Sakai is deployed at scale


Sakai relies on keeping persistent information in a database. It stores content in the database or in the file system, and the application itself resides on the local file system. For small deployments, it is possible to have the database, file storage, and application on the same computer. However, the impact of a disk failure and the lack of stability under high-load conditions and long-term scalability make that structure less attractive for medium and large-scale, deployments. By placing the file system and database on separate servers, you not only gain more capacity, but it also becomes easier to diagnose performance bottlenecks. Scaling Sakai to more than one application server allows load balancers to distribute sessions and serve a larger number of users. The load can be divided among available hardware according to its capability, which allows sites to scale ad-hoc as the new equipment becomes available. The load-balanced infrastructure also enables...