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

Example deployments


Unless your institute is aggressively ambitious, when deploying Sakai for the first time, it is sensible to keep the range of additional tools to a minimum. The more code you have, the more code you will need to verify, and the more configuration possibilities will exist. This minimalistic mentality ensures the greatest opportunity for stability and lowers the risks of random calls at random times for those poor administrators that are so very busy in the engine rooms shoveling coal.

Sometimes, the balance is difficult to find. Tools such as Evaluations tool, beg for deployment due to their wealth of enhanced pedagogically supportive functionality and wide-scale deployment by well-known universities around the world. Even under these circumstances, first test thoroughly before deployment. Bringing in the administrators early at this point increases their specific, tool-related skill levels before the noise of daily battle.

During the course of time, as administrators...