e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • Sakai Blogging

    I have been thinking a bit about how my new roles on the Sakai Foundation Board and Product Council intersect with my role as a blogger. To be clear, I intend to maintain my independence on e-Literate. I will continue to praise other platforms when I see something praiseworthy, and to speak out when I see something in the Sakai community that I think could be better.

    That said, one way in which I might be able to usefully combine the two worlds is to use e-Literate as a platform for increased transparency into the Sakai community. There’s a lot going on that isn’t always obvious to many community members, never mind the general public. I’m going to do my best to bring some of these goings on to broader attention. And obviously, I wouldn’t be volunteering for the roles I’ve taken on if I didn’t believe in Sakai—both the software and the community.

    All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I will be posting more about Sakai going forward, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing about other platforms.

  • IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

    Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.

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  • Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support

    In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included:

    • Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links
    • New Quicklink type to allow links to Tool Providers to be easily incorporated throughout Desire2Learn courses
    • Links to external learning tools that can send user, organization, and course context information for a personalized experience in the tool; single-sign-on to learning tools is supported through an oAuth framework using a key/secret shared between the external learning tool and the configured link in Learning Environment
    • Management tools to configure mapping from Desire2Learn roles to IMS roles, and from Desire2Learn org unit types to IMS context types

    A couple of other platforms are following D2L on this road.

    This is just the work that’s visible to the public. As is often the case with these things, (a) more work is going on behind the scenes, but (b) you should demand to see working code and a commitment to a supported release within a defined time frame before taking any statements of support by a vendor or project too seriously.

    Kudos to Desire2Learn for taking the lead here.

  • UNC's Sakai Evaluation Results

    The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:

    The findings of the pilot are positive, leading the Sakai Action Group to recommend ITS continue to fund Sakai for the 2009-2010 academic year, implement student information system (SIS) integration, when possible, expand the number of participants using Sakai, and research a possible future migration path.

    The whole report is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights from my perspective:

    • There are relatively few comments from faculty or students about functionality gaps in one direction or the other. To the contrary, the platforms were seen by many as being functionally equivalent. LMS’s have reached that “good enough” stage where they are starting to commoditize.
    • There were two exceptions to the “equivalent functionality” rule. First, a number of users seemed to appreciate Sakai’s more flexible permissions structure. I have written about the under-appreciated importance of groups and permissions on many occasions. The second was the ability to use Sakai for non-course work groups, projects, communities, etc. Blackboard has this capability, but you have to pay extra and license it separately. Frankly, I don’t know how they get away with it. No other LMS that I know of charges you twice for what is 95% the same functionality.
    • There were lots of comments on usability, and almost all of them broke in Sakai’s favor. First of all, this confirms the point that I’ve made a few times here that usability is often more important than functionality. From UNC’s data, it looks like faculty and students were able to do more with Sakai while making fewer calls to the help desk. Which brings me to the other part of this. Three years ago, Sakai’s usability was bad to the point of being embarrassing. But it absolutely kicked Blackboard’s butt in UNC’s review. This is strong affirmation of the huge strides the Sakai community has made in usability.

    Good stuff.

  • Review: Sakai Courseware Management

    I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while. I promised Michael Korcuska that I would review the new Sakai book that he co-wrote with Alan Berg. This is a particularly important milestone for the Sakai community because it is the first one published about the LMS. When you have only one book on a system, it needs to cover a lot of ground to satisfy the different audiences. In contrast, because there are at least ten books written about Moodle, it is possible to have one written just about using it to teach 7- to 14-year-olds. Can the new Sakai book be all things to all audiences? Does it meet the challenge? The short answer is “mostly”.

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  • Sakai Boston 2009: The State of the Union

    I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.

    Speaking of which, I am pleased to say that the Sakai 3 effort looks significantly stronger coming out of the conference than it did going in. The Boston conference may be remembered in retrospect as the moment when the community rallied the resources necessary to deliver a completely refactored Sakai. Time will tell.

    At any rate, on to the categories:

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  • Sakai 3 Is Like Mac OS X

    There’s an important point about the the forthcoming Sakai 3 that probably has escaped most casual observers. It is close to a ground-up rewrite. Sakai 3 is to Sakai 2 as Mac OS X was to Mac OS 9, in the following ways:

    • The technological heart (or kernel) of the new version is completely different from the old version.
    • That kernel leapfrogs many current-generation architectures (which are really aging legacy architectures, for the most part) for software of its category.
    • Some of the applications that run on the old version will be able to run on the new version with some modest to moderate development.
    • Other applications on the old system will have to be completely re-implemented on the new system.
    • Still other applications could run on the new system with some tweaking (and probably will for a couple of versions), but they will seem awkward in the new environment until they are re-implemented.
    • Users who have lots of apps that they want to carry over in the old environment will probably want to run that old environment together with the new one in some sort of co-existence mode. New adoptees will care less about that and skip co-existence mode, provided that the new system has the apps that they need.
    • At some point, co-existence mode will go away and adoptees will have to migrate to the new system to stay current. How current adoptees respond to this transition will be largely a function of how well the migration path is done, but some users who are attached to the way the old system worked will have trouble letting go regardless.
    • The first release is likely to have some very impressive capabilities as well as some feature gaps and rough edges. It will be suitable for full replacement use by some, for piloting by others, while still others will want to wait for another release or two. (Whether the 2010 milestone release of Sakai 3 is more like OS X 10.0 or 10.1 in this respect remains to be seen.)
    • The new kernel will likely enable accelerated innovation and impressive progress from release to release, with feature gaps getting filled quickly and new capabilities that nobody has seen before coming too.

    I think there is a good chance that, within a few releases, Sakai 3 will be a trend-setter in its category much like Mac OS X is.