Sakai CLE Courseware Management

Table of Contents

Sakai CLE Courseware Management

Credits

Foreword

The Sakai Community

Educational Community License

The Sakai Foundation

Change is the norm

Getting started

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

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Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

Why Subscribe?

Free Access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. What is Sakai?

Sakai tools

The Sakai Foundation

Sakai worksite

The community

Branches

Workgroups

Developers

Rogues Gallery

Sakai's academic background

A brief history

The Java-based tool creation

Sakai 1.0

Present day

What's Next? — The Sakai open academic environment

Advantages for organizations

Summary

2. Feet First: Running the Demo

Installing the demo

Administrator's account

Expanding the demo

Help is your friend

Live demos

Building from the source

Summary

3. Sakai 2.x Anatomy

The Sakai framework

The aggregation layer

The presentation layer

The tools layer

The services layer

Core technologies

How Sakai is deployed at scale

Load balancing

Frontend servers

Database preferences

The Java Virtual Machine

Enterprise data integration

Sakai OAE anatomy

Architectural overview

Client-side anatomy (3akai-ux)

Nakamura server-side anatomy (Nakamura)

Summary

4. My First Site

Tool-specific help

Managing project sites

Browsing the demonstration

Site creation

Creating a course site

Tools of immediate value

Maintaining your site details

Starter tips

Descriptions are important

Password strength

The motivation for sections

Creating sections

Summary

5. Enterprise Bundle Tools and Quality Assurance

Using Core tools in Sakai 2.6

Core tools since Sakai 2.6

From Contrib to Provisional

Stealthily to Core

Enterprise-level quality

The Quality Assurance process

QA leads

Maintenance releases

Automated testing

Automatic code analysis

Summary

6. Worksite Tools

Creating flashcards

Commonalities between tools

The Resources tool

Using course tools together

The context

Making a communication plan

Placing Content

Assessing individual students

Introducing Portfolios

Towards OSP integration in Sakai OAE

Summary

7. Contributed Tools

An apology of sorts

The range of contributed tools

Sponsoring creativity

Pros and cons

A list of tools

Example deployments

The University of Michigan

Interview with David Haines, Senior Developer at Michigan

The University of Cape Town

Creating tools

Building tools

SASH

Interview with Steven Githens, the force behind SASH

Summary

8. Putting Sakai to Work

The tools and structure of a Sakai site

Sakai's site structure

My Workspace

The Home tool contents

The basic collaboration tools

Site administration

The basic teaching and learning tools

Types of Sakai sites

Problem-based courses

Small discussion courses

Large introductory courses

Project-based courses

Collaboration sites

Building your Home page

Check out the new look

Edit your page

Replace the site description

Customize the Home page

Ready to roll

Summary

9. The Administration Workspace

What is a Sakai administrator?

The Administration tool set

Basic concepts

Internal ID

Java

Realms

sakai.properties

An interview with Anthony Atkins

Summary

10. Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise

Protocols

Playing with Telnet

Installing TCPMON

Requests and returned status codes

SOAP

JSON

REST

Existing web services

Recapping terminology

Default web services

Sakai and SOAP

My first web service

My first client

A more realistic client example

Entity Broker

Finding descriptions of services

Authenticating

A client-side coding example

Interview with author Aaron Zeckoski, the author of Entity Broker

WSRP

Summary

11. Tips from the Trenches

The benefits of knowing that frameworks exist

Using the third-party frameworks

The benefit of using Spring

Hibernate for database coupling

The many Apache frameworks

Looking at dependencies

An expanded tour of Java

Introduction

Profiling using JMX

The Apache web server

Migration

Migrating course content

A bit of history

Enabling LMS content import

A note about IMS Common Cartridge

Using Import from File

Interviews at the deep end

Megan May

Seth Theriault

David Howitz

Summary

12. Understanding Common Error Messages

A policy of containment of errors

Reporting

Quality Assurance analysis

Production systems

Configuring logging

Common error messages

Java version

Port issues

Out of memory

The portal

The database

Search

sakai.properties

File permissions

Class not found

Information sources

Summary

13. Show Cases

Acknowledgements

CamTools: Using Sakai to support teaching and learning in a research-intensive university

About the authors

CamTools: Sakai at the University of Cambridge

Evidence-informed approaches to virtual learning environment development: the case of Plant Sciences

New directions

Sakai @ the University of Amsterdam

About the author

About the University

E-learning

The SURF Foundation

UvA communities — a Sakai collaboration environment

Web Klassen

Conflict Studies

IIS Communities

The Hague Forum for Judicial Expertise

Project site

Testweeklab

Digital Portfolio — a different use case

Why Sakai?

University of Michigan

Sakai success story

Transforming the education experience

Supporting the dissertation process

Streamlining academic administration

Future directions

UFP-UV: UFP in the Sakai project

Abstract

Introduction

Sakai usage, full adoption

The current Sakai skin at UFP

The UFP tools

Sakai usage at UFP

Concurrent users during January 2006 — January 2007

September 2006 — September 2007

Up to September, 2007

Marist College and Sakai

Background

The commercial partner implementation model

Migrating a campus to Sakai

Tangible outcomes

rSmart

Overview

History

Easy to adopt

Easy to try

Crossing the border into research: A case study of students' engagement with a virtual research environment

About the authors

Background

Tutor engagement

Data collection

Student engagement

Key themes

Conclusions and recommendations

SOLO — Taking e-learning offline

About the author

Background

Internet bandwidth and cost

North-West University (South Africa)

How Solo works

The LAMP Consortium — like a bundle of sticks

About the author

Introducing the project

Award winning

Winning factors

The LAMP experience

Criminology — a distance course in Sakai

About the authors

The Department of Criminology

Description of the distance course

Experiences — Lessons learned

Clarifying the structure of a course

The importance of the group

The social space

The absence of feedback

The need of support

Future development

Conclusion

Summary

14. Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai

The Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award

Case studies from the winner's circle

2008's First place winner: Biomedical Engineering (University of Michigan, USA)

Course description

Course development and delivery

Collaboration and communication

Learning materials

Learning outcomes and assessment

Course's look and feel, web usability

Learner support

Teaching innovation

Interactions with subject matter experts

Interactions with the instructor and curriculum

Interactions with content

Interactions with peers

Innovation snapshot: Forensic science goes online

Project overview

How Sakai was used

Implications for Teaching and Learning

Lesson learned

2008's Second place winner: International Law (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Course description

Course development and delivery

Collaboration and communication

Learning outcomes and assessment

Course's look & feel, web usability

Learner support

Teaching innovation

Interactions with subject-matter experts

Interactions with peers

Interactions with content

Innovation Snapshot: Facebook meets history

Project overview

How Sakai was used

Impact on teaching and learning

Lessons learned

Conclusions

Passive versus active learning

Teacher-centered versus student-centered learning

Less innovative versus more innovative uses of tools

Summary

15. A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional Management

Introduction

Context

The University's IT department

The challenges of a shared service center

Educational systems and administrative systems

Open source at the IC

Introduction

Success with uPortal and CAS

Sakai on the fringes

Sakai at UvA

An interview with the director

Summary

16. Participating in the Sakai Community

The Sakai Foundation

Consensus building

The Foundation acting as the legal home

Partnering up

The community

DoOcracy

Transparent communication

Conferences

Collab - Mailing Lists

Work Groups

Asynchronous communication

Open code, Open Standards

The QA network

The risk of information loss

The current wish list

Summary

17. Looking Ahead: Sakai OAE

Early experiments and functional principles

Sakai OAE

Managing the project to build the new environment

Educators' input

Summary

A. Terminology

B. Resources

Sakai Foundation support

The community

Best practices

Training material

Tools

Index

Sakai CLE Courseware Management

The Official Guide

Sakai CLE Courseware Management

The Official Guide

Copyright © 2011 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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First published: July 2011

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ISBN 978-1-849515-42-9

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Cover Image by Asher Wishkerman (<a.wishkerman@mpic.de>)

Credits

Authors

Alan Berg

Ian Dolphin

Co-authors

Micheal Korcuska

Aileen Huang-Saad

Salim A. Nakhjawani

Andrea Crampton

Edith Sheffer

Robert Coyle

Josh Baron

David Jan Donner

Léon Raijman

Michael Fieldstein

Reviewers

Tony Atkins

Steven Swinsburg

Margaret Wagner

Copy Editor

Kriti Sharma

Acquisition Editor

Reshma Sundaresan

Development Editor

Kartikey Pandey

Technical Editors

Mohd. Sahil

Manasi Poonthottam

Indexers

Monica Ajmera

Tejal Daruwale

Project Coordinator

Joel Goveya

Proofreaders

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Clyde Jenkins

Graphics

Nilesh Mohite

Production Coordinators

Adline Swetha Jesuthas

Kruthika Bangera

Cover Work

Adline Swetha Jesuthas

Foreword

The Sakai Community

Open Source software efforts are organized in a variety of different ways. Some of them are driven primarily by a single commercial organization. Others, like Linux, are a result of a diverse contribution of many individuals and organizations and are often led by a benevolent dictator. The Sakai community fits neither of these descriptions but, instead, is at its core, a collegial alignment of educational institutions and commercial organizations, working collaboratively to build the Sakai software. Often an organization will commit the time of staff members to participate in Sakai. In other cases, individuals volunteer their time to contribute something of value.

The Sakai community as a whole, not a single organization or individual, is responsible for all aspects of evolving Sakai software. There is no central decision maker, which places a premium on communication in determining the best way forward based on the merits of the idea. Sakai software is designed truly by education, for education. These community members, who generally work at educational institutions around the world, sit extremely close to the end users of Sakai. Members of the Sakai community believe that this community-driven development model leads to the best product for use on campus, shortening the distance between identifying the need for innovation and its realization. So, when you interact with the Sakai community you should keep in mind that nobody is in charge — your contributions will be accepted based on their value and the time and effort you have put into contributing.

This community is fundamental to Sakai's value. Sharing product development, academic, and e-learning best practices with peers around the world is a unique aspect of Sakai, a rare cross-institutional collaboration in higher education information technology. For many organizations and individuals, this aspect of Sakai is cited as the reason they choose to participate, and is at least as important as the functionality of the software itself.

Educational Community License

Sakai is distributed as free and open source software. Access to this code is extremely valuable to those who want to customize their on-campus instance or wish to develop innovative new tools. However, open source code is important to the entire Sakai community. The ability to make that one change to the code for your campus can be crucially important, and that change can be added to the Sakai code base, removing the need for customization as you upgrade. In addition, the source code serves as the ultimate insurance policy, ensuring that you aren't locked into a single vendor.

Sakai uses the Educational Community License (ECL), a minor variant of the Apache License. This license is commercial friendly because it allows the Sakai code to be extended and bundled with proprietary code and re-distributed — it allows the use of the source code for the development of proprietary software as well as free and open source software (of course, the original Sakai code in any such commercial re-distribution remains free and open source). This distinguishes Sakai from the open source projects that use the GPL license, which require that any released extensions to the software should also be free and open source. In part, because of this license, Sakai has attracted a variety of well-known commercial partners, small and large, including IBM and Oracle. This growing network of Sakai Commercial Affiliates is an important part of the Sakai ecosystem, providing institutions with a range of choices as to how Sakai software is supported.

The Sakai Foundation

The Sakai Foundation is a member supported non-profit corporation with a small staff and modest budget. It was created in 2006 when the original Mellon funding for Sakai had run its course. Those involved in the Sakai effort wanted a small organization to continue to coordinate the activities of the community. While membership in the Foundation is optional, approximately 70 organizations around the world support the foundation, so that it can continue its important community activities. These include managing the intellectual property of Sakai, organizing conferences and planning meetings, maintaining the Sakai technology infrastructure including the bug tracking system and project Wiki, coordinating development activities and quality assurance, and publishing the Sakai CLE releases and functioning as a public advocate for Sakai.

Change is the norm

Since the first edition of this book, much has happened. The Sakai Foundation is in discussion with another open source community working in higher education - Jasig. The planned merger of Sakai and Jasig promises a wealth of opportunity for further community collaboration and product improvement.

A product range is emerging with the creation of Sakai OAE, a socially aware educational platform that complements and expands the capabilities of the Sakai CLE. These two applications will work well together via what is known as hybrid mode. The whole will be better than the sum of parts.

Sakai CLE is a hardened product, forged in the fire of mission critical use. Expect large scale community support for many years and a continued expansion to the feature set. Expect also a continued focus on quality and operational stability.

Change is the norm and so is production stability. Watch this space (http://sakaiproject.org/).

Getting started

It is time to get started. Chapter 1 provides a good overview of the Sakai CLE and a little more detail on the history of Sakai and the Sakai community. After that, it's feet first into the software itself — you'll have a Sakai demo up and running by the end of Chapter 2. From that point, it's up to you. Readers with a technology background will certainly be interested in the chapters, Setting up Sakai, and The Administration Workspace. Though the book there is important information about the wide variety of tools that are available in Sakai and what is important for getting the most out of Sakai. Using Sakai For Teaching and Collaboration will be of special interest to anyone using Sakai or supporting Sakai end-users. And Show Cases provides many case studies and examples of Sakai in use. In many ways that is the most important chapter in the book because it demonstrates that so much of the value of using Sakai comes from being part of the community. By reading this book, you are taking a first (or another) step into that community. Welcome aboard!

Ian Dolphin

Executive Director at Sakai Foundation

About the Authors

Alan Berg Bsc. MSc. PGCE, is the Sakai Foundations Quality Assurance Director for two major software releases (Sakai 2.7, 2.8). For the last twelve years, Alan has also been the lead developer at the Central Computer Services at the University of Amsterdam. In his famously scarce spare time, he writes computer articles. Alan has a degree, two masters, and a teaching qualification. In previous incarnations, he was a technical writer, an Internet/Linux course writer — Ok!, a product line development officer, and a teacher. He likes to get his hands dirty with the building and gluing of systems. He remains agile by ruining various development environments with his proof of concepts that are better left in the darker shadows never to escape.

Thank you, Hester, Nelson, and Lawrence. I felt supported and occasionally understood by my family. Yes, you may pretend you don't know me, but you do. Without your unwritten understanding that 2 am is a normal time to work, and a constant supply of sarcasm is good for my soul, I would not have finished this or any other large-scale project.

I am lucky to be working within the Sakai community who have responded positively to my requests for help, as it always has done, with thought out text and advice that enhanced the value of this book. Parts of this book are written by specific members of the community.

I would particularly like to acknowledge Margaret Wagner of Sakai Newsletter fame for her hard work during both editions of this book and her attention to detail while turning my random words into sentences.

Thank you Tony Mobily, owner and editor of the FreeSoftware Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/); your wise words at complex moments helped.

Ian Dolphin is the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, a not-for-profit entity that coordinates the Sakai community's production of software to support learning, teaching, and research collaboration. Ian has worked in education for thirty years, having formerly been International Director of a strategic partnership of agencies supporting higher education in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and prior to that, the Head of eStrategy at the University of Hull in the UK.

David Jan Donner graduated with a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1987 from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He works as an applications and functional administrator in the Education and Research Services group, where he monitors the requirements for a portfolio system and a communities system, both based on Sakai, the portal for students, and Blackboard. Since 2006, David Jan has been a member of the ondernemingsraad — the staff's corporate council.

Léon Raijmann is the manager of the Education and Research Services Group at the Central Computing Services of UvA. The Education and Re¬search Services group consists of 25 people, and is responsible for developing new IT systems to facilitate learning and teaching. Léon trained as a scientist with hands-on experience in e-learning and e-research (he holds a PhD in Biology); he now finds himself between e-learning experts.

About the Reviewers

Tony Atkins is an administrator and developer with nearly 15 years experience developing and supporting web applications. He currently works as a Senior Support Engineer in the Amsterdam office of Atlassian. Previously, Tony worked at both UHI and Virginia Tech supporting their use of educational technologies like Blackboard and Sakai. Prior to that, he was the Technical Director of the Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech, where he developed the ETD-db, an open source system for managing theses and dissertations. He has also contributed to the book Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Sourcebook for Educators, Students, and Librarians.

I would like to thank my wife for her constant support and understanding, and my colleagues in the Sakai community and beyond for all the excellent conversations and inspiration.

Steven Swinsburg is a Software Engineer at the Australian National University. He holds a Master's Degree in Information Technology and a Bachelor of Science Degree, both from the University of New England, Australia. Steve also operates his own Sakai consultancy business, 'Flying Kite', providing Sakai development and integration services to clients in the Australasian region, as well as overseas. Steve has been involved with the Sakai community since 2006 and is an active member of the Technical Coordination Committee, the Maintenance Team, the Kernel Team and the Security Working Group. Steve has written over a dozen articles on Sakai best practices and how-tos, and regularly blogs about Sakai related developments. In 2008, he had a paper on Sakai in distance education published in the Australian ascilite journal. In recognition of his contributions, Steve was selected as a Sakai Foundation Fellow in 2009.

Margaret Wagner is a senior technical writer at the University of Michigan. She has been involved with the Sakai Project since its earliest predecessors, UM.CourseTools, UM.WorkTools, and CHEF, were developed, and she wrote the original help guides for these applications. Margaret is also the editor of the Sakai Newsletter, which is received by members of the Sakai Community around the world every two weeks. Margaret attended Whitman College, University of Colorado, and University of Michigan, where she studied linguistics and piano performance.

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Preface

This book is the officially endorsed Sakai CLE guide. From setting up and running Sakai for the first time to using its tools creatively, this book delivers everything you need to know.

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.

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 required for running a demonstration version of Sakai and that needed for maintaining production systems. You will then strengthen your concepts by going through real-world situations given in this book.

The book also discusses what motivates management at the University of Amsterdam to buy into Sakai. Finally, Ian Dolphin, the executive director of the Sakai Foundation, looks towards the future.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is Sakai, is an introduction to Sakai.

Chapter 2, Feet First: Running the Demo, explains how to install a demo version of the Sakai CLE. One way to approach understanding the content of this book is to have the demo running while reading the chapters on specific toolsets.

Chapter 3, Sakai 2.x Anatomy, explains the underpinning technologies and how system integrators have deployed Sakai at large scales in practice.

Chapter 4, My First Site, describes how to create and manage your first site.

Chapter 5, Enterprise Bundle Tools and Quality Assurance, covers the many different site tools that are available to you and how quality is defended during their development.

Chapter 6, Worksite Tools, discusses the various types of tools and shows how they are used in sites.

Chapter 7, Contributed Tools, covers tools that have been built by third parties to fulfill specific needs. These tools are not found in the standard Sakai demonstration, but do have a lot of potential for improving a student's online learning experiences.

Chapter 8, Putting Sakai to Work, discusses how to use tools in combination to create a better online learning experience.

Chapter 9, The Administration Workspace, introduces the administrative features of Sakai.

Chapter 10, Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise, discusses the Sakai web services for creating and maintaining users, sites, and groups and lists a wide variety of existing services explaining how to discover and connect to them.

Chapter 11, Tips from the Trenches, is an advanced chapter that explains concepts that you need during first-time Sakai deployments. In this chapter, you will find an overview of third-party frameworks on which Sakai, how to manage and monitor Java, and interviews with various experts.

Chapter 12, Common Error Messages, is about common error messages in Sakai and how to deal with them.

Chapter 13, Show Cases, presents ten international case studies showing Sakai at its best.

Chapter 14, Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai, takes a look at what makes an award winning course, award winning.

Chapter 15, A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional, discusses motivations for deploying open source applications in higher education environments, such as at the University of Amsterdam.

Chapter 16, Participating in the Sakai Community, discusses how to interact with the Sakai community successfully.

Chapter 17, The Sakai long-term vision, is a discussion about the future of Sakai.

Appendix A, Terminology, defines the many terminologies and concepts used in Sakai.

Appendix B, Resources, explains the best practices, communities, tools, and training material to help others learn and use Sakai effectively.

What you need for this book

Some prior knowledge of interacting with a Learning Management System is expected, but no prior knowledge of Java or web page authoring is needed for this book. Readers will get a deeper level of knowledge on how to use and run Sakai.

Who this book is for

This book is written for a wide audience that includes teachers, system administrators, and first-time developers. It will also appeal to the Sakai open source community, potential community members, and education's decision makers.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish among different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: The following piece of Perl code gets a session string and then uses it as a part of a second web service call to the addNewUser method which, as you would expect from.

A block of code is set as follows:

public class MyTest{

public String YouSaid(String message){

return You said: +message;

}

}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

mvn -Ppack-demo instal

mvn dependency:list

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: Uncomment the bean definitions for the Announcements handler and Samigo handler if you wish to import their content.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Chapter 1. What is Sakai?

Sakai is an open source, web-based, Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) that is primarily focused on higher education, and has been adopted by hundreds of institutions. It supports the activities of students, teachers, and researchers. Sakai also provides an administrative interface. Sakai is flexible, and can be configured for a variety of specialized audiences.

While Sakai can be used to support research and general-purpose collaborations, it is most widely deployed as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Sakai provides users with learning, portfolio, library, and project tools. Teachers can create course sites and add chatrooms, forums, blogs, wikis, and a range of other tools. Students can use the tools to undertake activities related to learning, including uploading assignments, completing tests, and interacting with instructors and classmates. Finally, researchers and groups of peers can create project sites for sharing materials and specific interactions. Sakai is designed to be flexible, and has a set of frameworks (internal structures) that make it easier for those who want to build their own tools or services with it.

Sakai is capable of scaling to even the largest and most demanding environments. Indiana University, for example, maintains a deployment for at least 100,000 students. The University of Michigan deploys for 70,000 students. UNISA, in South Africa, deploys to over 200,000 learners and academic staff.

Sakai tools

The basic concept behind the functionality that Sakai provides is that the users control their own sites; for example, they can choose which tools to include in the sites they create. The application treats users as adults and enables flexibility through choice.

The tools include chat, forums, wiki, polls, Google-like search capabilities, and others with more becoming available with every new version of Sakai. Numerous tools enhance group formation and coherence, allowing for intuitive interaction (hence the word collaboration in collaboration and learning environment).

The range of tools is rich indeed, especially if you include all those contributed by the energetic and motivated Sakai community. Many local deployments have specialized tools for which they develop their own enhancements. As Sakai grows in strength, the number of extras is also rapidly increasing. The Sakai Foundation website mentions at least 20 extras and the foundation's source code repository has around 170 contributed directories.

Sakai was designed around a framework that significantly simplifies the creation of tools. Developers do not have to reinvent the wheel for fundamental services such as finding a username, managing a site's look and feel, or internationalization. There are strong and well-established lines of support for developers, including style guides, best practices, a programmer's café, workshops, and central Quality Assurance (QA), throughout a development project's full life cycle.

To help organizations decide which tools to deploy in their production environments (for example, a college campus), which tools to start looking at for future use, and which to retire, each tool is assigned a status:

Core: Tools with which the community has a great deal of experience and is confident about their robustness, stability, and scalability.

Provisional: Tools with which the community has less experience or which are becoming obsolete. These are disabled by default.

Contrib: Tools with which the community has little experience and which the QA work group does not recommend for use in a production environment. Contrib tools are available, separately from the main release, in the Contrib area of Sakai's source repository.

Watching the code base over time, you see a convection effect where Contrib tools move to Provisional, are thoroughly tested, and move to the Core; and then older core tools move down to either provisional or are pensioned off. As time passes, there is a quality convergence — the software gets thoroughly debugged, first by a team of dedicated testers, and then by real-life high-scale deployments. In the end, educational organizations and users have more choices and sophistication built into the environment.

The Sakai Foundation

The Sakai Foundation is a non-profit organization that was set up in late 2005 to encourage community building between academic institutions, nonprofits, and commercial organizations. It coordinates the release cycle and stimulates the ongoing health of the Sakai community by organizing and sponsoring conferences and fellowships. It facilitates the software creation life cycle, from development, through testing and quality assurance, to polishing the user experience.

Recognizing the need for best practice and a methodology for decreasing the learning curve for new tool developers, the Sakai Foundation, with the help of Aaron Zeckoski (http://aaronz-sakai.blogspot.com), set up the Programmer's Café.

Aaron is one example of a highly-motivated community developer, spending much of his free time evolving the product and supporting other members in the community.

Programmer's Café is a set of lectures and hands-on programming labs focused on building new Sakai tools. By the end of the café, the programmers have learned enough to create their own masterpieces. The programmer's café is also about the best practices and how to use the Eclipse programmers' IDE effectively.

Sakai conference organizers traditionally schedule the café for the day before the main conference presentations, and occasionally, a trainer delivers the café as a separate set of planned events. Please see: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BOOT/Programmer%27s+Cafe for more details.

You can find more information on the Sakai Foundation's website (http://sakaiproject.org), as shown in the following screenshot. Notice the links to documentation and downloads. Foundation members work to ensure that the information online is as up-to-date as possible.

Note

The Sakai motto: Collaboration and learning for educators, by educators, which is free and open source, is taken seriously. Much care has gone into creating an educationally supportive infrastructure that is free to download, change, and use as you like, with a clear vision of keeping this true forever. The all-too common nightmare of IP trolls attacking your organization for licensing dues has no place here.

The development of the Sakai CLE has been date-driven, with aggressive milestones and a transparent requirements process. The implication is that, by the time you read this chapter, the next version of Sakai will be out. There will be more tools for users to choose from, many minor enhancements and performance improvements, numerous bugs spotted and removed, and many honest discussions at the local and international conferences, especially in the mailing lists.

Sakai worksite

The next screenshot shows a generic Sakai workspace for a newly-created user who has logged on for the first time. On the left-hand side are links to the default set of tools. The main area is for expressing the tools' functionalities, and the tabs at the top of the screen enable you to move between sites of which you are a member.

By default, a new user owns a worksite with only a basic set of tools enabled, including a few for administration purposes. If the user wants, he or she can request a project, course, or portfolio site:

Project: A project site has two main types of users: the site maintainer and those who can use and share the resources and tools. Typical users of a project site include researchers working on the same study, teachers who wish to compare notes, and other groups of users who wish to interact together online.

Course: A course site is a online expression of a real course. It might be established entirely for online delivery, or to support face-to-face teaching. The target audience comprises teachers who maintain the site with teaching assistants, and students who use the site. Teachers can post exams, send announcements, upload syllabi and grade book results, and choose which tools the students can use to interact. Teaching assistants have fewer privileges, but can maintain forums and help maintain processes, such as the marking of assignments. Students can communicate with their peers or teachers and teaching assistants, take tests, upload files, and send mails to others in the course.

Portfolio: Portfolio sites are places where students store evidence of their work in a structured format. As a student progresses through his or her education or course, that evidence builds up within an online structure of links and web pages. This can be helpful for finding employment later on because potential employers can make judgments based on the evidence presented in the portfolio.

Tip

Where have the tools gone?

The demo has more tools to choose from than are normally seen in production; the provisional tools are active to give you an opportunity to play with the technology and judge the tools' value before the next release.

Later chapters cover these three types of sites in more detail, beginning with Chapter 4 My First Site. For the administrator, a special admin site includes tools for daily business, such as sending messages of the day to the entire user base, managing sites and users, scheduling tasks, and generally tweaking the whole environment. Chapter 9, The Administration Workspace, provides extensive information about this site.

The community

In a very real