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

Early experiments and functional principles


Around 2008, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge began to experiment with a different approach to online research collaboration and learning environments, both functionally and technologically. From a functional perspective, they established a few basic principles:

  • Everything is social: These days, it seems hard to imagine designing software for the Web without incorporating some social element. Furthermore, education and research are inherently collaborative endeavors that should lend themselves naturally to the social web. But they aren't a perfect fit for today's consumer web social tools. Colleges and universities have ethical and legal obligations to protect privacy; simply suggesting the use of Facebook is, as a consequence, a less than ideal solution. But more fundamentally, academic collaboration is different than generic social networking. It revolves around content and subject...