There are many types of relationships and collaborations between users of a Sakai site. An instructor may wish to push information out through announcements, notifications, and messages. They may communicate their knowledge through blogs, forums, wikis, or via files stored in Resources. The Podcast tool is an easy method for delivering the recorded voice of lecturers. In the future, live interactions will happen with the Big Blue Button tool: Agora (http://bigbluebutton.org, http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BBB/Home), which is an online meeting tool with whiteboard functionality.
Sakai is owner of a site can choose which tools to include and decide the permissions for each of the user roles. Perhaps the site owner wants a less instructor-centric view of the universe and so chooses to enable the students to be more responsible. The Wiki tool is excellent for ad hoc document generation and the Contrib tool Forum can be used for viewing and marking the...