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

Tools


The links mentioned in this section point to tools that developers use daily. The password wallet and flashcard tool mentioned are also generally useful.

  • http://www.eclipse.com: Eclipse is the programmers' open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice when working with Sakai. Eclipse functionality can be expanded by third-party plugins.

  • http://source.sakaiproject.org/appbuilder/update: Home of App builder, a Sakai-specific plug-in for Eclipse, which takes a lot of the drudgery out of building new Sakai tools.

  • http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html: Subclipse is an Eclipse plugin that enhances its ability to talk with Sakai's source code repository.

  • http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse: Findbugs is a plugin that searches for around 400 types of coding bad practices.

  • http://pmd.sf.net/eclipse: PMD is an Eclipse plugin that finds specific programming errors. Findbugs and PMD compliment each other's analyses and generally find different bug types.

  • http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/destroy_annoying_bugs_part_2: A magazine article on bug removal with Eclipse, Findbugs, and PMD.

  • http://openjdk.java.net/tools/svc/jconsole/: Jconsole allows you to monitor the resource utilization of Sakai live.

  • http://ws.apache.org/commons/tcpmon/: TCPMON is a handy tool for debugging interactions with web services. It allows you to watch the requests that are sent from web browsers to a server and the returned responses.

  • http://subversion.tigris.org/: Subversion is the program that stores the Sakai source code. This URL not only points to Subversion, but also the associated client-side tools.

  • http://maven.apache.org/: Maven is the command-line tool that developers use to build Sakai from source code.

  • http://www.mysql.com/: The open source database MySQL is a supported Sakai database type. The link points to its home page where you can find not only the binaries, but also a full set of documentation and client-side tools, such as a visual database browser.

  • http://keepass.info: A password wallet that can store multiple passwords in an encrypted format that is ready for use when you need to log on to many different services on the Internet.

  • http://flashcards.sourceforge.net: Flashcards are an excellent way to help you remember things. Jflash was used in this book for learning about the specifics of Sakai tools.