January Open Source Report

This month’s Longsight Open Source Report focuses on Sakai, the collaboration and learning environment for education. The Longsight Group was a sponsor of the 8th Sakai Conference which was held in California during the first week of December with tracks for those who develop Sakai, deploy Sakai and use Sakai.

Reliability and quality assurance are the Sakai Foundation’s top goals

Michael Korcuska, the Sakai Foundation’s Executive Director, put reliability and quality assurance at the top of the Foundation’s list of goals and said that the Foundation will double its already substantial commitment to the quality assurance process. Michael noted that quality is the key to innovation; without a quality foundation, no one can innovate.

Sakai’s quality assurance (QA) procedures are very successful as evidenced by Sakai’s overall reliability (in full production use for hundreds of thousands of students worldwide) and the tremendous level of innovation embodied in enhancements and new tools. New tools are assessed by the community as they move through a well-defined process from contributions to provisional tools and finally to core tools that are embraced by the community and distributed as part of Sakai. The Foundation’s director of quality assurance oversees much of this process.

Starting with release 2.5.0 which will be made public on February 12, 2008, the Foundation will identify all dot-zero (x.x.0) releases as betas to remind the community of their role in the QA process. The rapid move from 2.4.0 to 2.4.1 last fall was an example of how much better community source software can be from proprietary software.

The top priorities for the Foundation are:

  • Reliability and scalability
  • Usability and access
  • Project planning and road maps for the development process
  • Defining and making possible more use cases for collaboration and e-portfolios
  • Lowering the barriers to contribution to the Sakai Project

The Sakai Foundation is the non-profit organization that coordinates much of the work done in the Sakai community. Unlike most open source projects that are informally organized, Sakai as a community source effort has the Foundation to provide consensus-based leadership and stability. The Foundation is led by a community-elected Board who hires staff, sets goals and ensures that the Sakai collaboration and learning framework is sustained and responsive to our community’s needs.

Citation Helper – take a closer look!

One of the holy grails of e-learning is the integration of library resources into the campus learning systems. Faculty need to find, cite and give their students appropriate access to content licensed by their libraries. OCLC’s E-Learning Task Force gave this goal top billing in 2003, yet no proprietary learning systems have succeeded as has Sakai.

The Sakai Citation Helper uses your campus library’s metasearch services enabling instructors to create citation lists and e-reserves that directly link students enrolled in a course to the full text articles. The tool integrates with third-party applications such as RefWorks. Longsight has created a brief screencast of the Citation Helper in action: http://www.longsight.com/sakai/citation-list-screencast

The Citation Helper is a product of the Sakaibrary Project which is also working on a companion tool called Subject Research Guides. Stay tuned for more information as this tool emerges for testing soon.

 

Sakai tools meet diverse needs

A rich set of collaboration and pedagogical tools is a major strength of Sakai. Existing tools have been improved and new tools are moving forward each month. Many tools are ready for use today, while others are ready for testing or are in the early phases of development. Contact Longsight (information@longsight.com or 740-599-5005) for an assessment of these tools.

  • Context-aware Activity Notification System (CANS) will allow faculty and students to be notified about Sakai events at almost every level, from the posting of announcements to fine-scale events like a student viewing a specific resource page. CANS has several uses including the detection of “at risk” students. See http://www.cansaware.com for more information.



  • The Checklist tool will be used to chart graduate student progress through their degree requirements, but it’s clear that this concept has application in other areas as well.

  • Icons to represent each Sakai tool are forthcoming in release 2.5

  • There’s a new release coming for Site Stats, the tool that helps track usage within sites, and the Report tool that was part of the Open Source Portfolio suite is being moved “up” as a Sakai tool since data mining and reporting are important functions throughout the system.

  • Improvements have been made to JForum, one of the discussion tool options, which in release 2.5 should include the ability to grade discussion postings.

  • Messages and Forums have been improved in release 2.5 with the addition of bulk deletion and forwarding capabilities, and a synoptic view on the homepage.

  • The gradebook has been substantially improved in release 2.5 – contact Longsight (information@longsight.com or 740-599-5005) for more information.

  • The Resources tool, a primary space for uploading and managing content, has been tuned to improve performance in release 2.5. File permissions for the Podcast tool have been integrated with overall permissions that are set in the Resources area.

  • Mneme (prounounced “nee-mee”) is an assessment tool for Sakai covering the creation, management and delivery of quizzes and exams that will become important as its development is integrated into the Sakai community. Read more at http://etudesproject.org/mneme/















  • Reset Password allows Sakai users to retrieve a forgotten password (when their credentials are stored in Sakai) while the new Roleplay tool will allow limited aliasing of users in role playing activities.

  • The Page Object Content Sequencer, a new tool in the early stages of design and development, shows promise for creating content sequences through a simplified user interface.

  • An evaluation system is on the horizon that will provide opportunities for course evaluations.

  • The Schedule tool has been enhanced to work with external calendaring tools through the iCal standard while the new Sign Up tool makes it easier for individuals and groups to plan meetings, review sessions and office hours.

  • There are at least two developing tools that would capture input from “classroom clickers” for analysis and display within Sakai.

  • iFrames (an older and somewhat restrictive technology) are being eliminated from the top view of Sakai (the portal views) which should greatly improve access to Sakai for small screen devices such as smartphones.

  • SCORM player enables learning objects that comply with this standard to be played within the Sakai context.

  • Email notifications have been added to the Drop Box tool, and in release 2.5, instructors can see if a drop box contains something for them.

  • The Sakai Content Hosting Service (where content is stored in Sakai) is undergoing several improvements including the capability to reference repositories of content outside of the Sakai instance. Sakai connectivity to OpenCourseWare projects is another area of development (see http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/OCW/Home)

 

Sakai Conferences get a new focus

Sakai Conferences have been held every six months – in June and December – for the past four years, but that schedule is changing in an effort to engage more people in the Sakai Project.

Starting in 2008, there will be one annual conference and multiple regional conferences. The 2008 Sakai Conference will take place in Paris, France. The schedule for the regional meetings is yet to be determined, but it is likely that the regional conferences will be more topical. Whereas the 8th Sakai Conference in Newport Beach, California, had tracks for developers, support staff, and users, the regional conferences may focus on a particular audience.

At the recent conference, there were several presentations and discussions about increasing faculty input into the design process.

 

Fluid Project’s work on user interface issues shows potential

People interact with software through the “user interface” or UI and while a great deal is known about human computer interactions, the perfect UI remains elusive. Enter the Fluid Project. The goal of the Fluid project is to help improve the user interface of community and open source web applications. Go to http://fluidproject.org for the details. Simply put, the project is developing a software framework and development tools to allow Sakai and other projects to create flexible and transformable user interfaces for their applications. Nearly all software could use a boost in the user interface, so the Fluid Project’s goals are important, but is it working yet? Fluid has released version 0.1 so it’s too early to tell but some Sakai developers reported promising results using the Fluid UX Walkthrough toolkit to assess the user experience (UX).

 



The University of California at Berkeley’s new Image Gallery tool in Sakai is being developed within the Fluid framework and should go into production in the Fall of 2008. Plans for the image gallery include the ability to tag images.

Some Sakai interface features to look for include better central file management (aka “my files from anywhere”), easier file picking tools, playlists of files, tagging and tag clouds, smart folders that contain and process files and more drag-and-drop functionality.

Bottom line: Stay tuned…the Fluid Project is addressing an important area in Sakai’s development.

Tips for Sakai Users

  1. XSDWeaver was contributed by the University of Central Florida and is called the FormBuilder in Sakai. Same great tool for creating forms for e-portfolios – just a new name.
  2. Along the same lines, if you’re creating tests and quizzes, install the Claremont McKenna College’s “Word2QTI” tool to make the creation of tests much easier! Check it out at http://webapps.cmc.edu/sakai_quiz_tool/
  3. Talking to faculty about adopting Sakai? Hearing that no one has time? Examine how many hours of their time (and their students' time) goes into each course. It’s about the same amount of time per credit regardless of the pedagogical approach (hybrid, purely online, collaborative, recitation, etc). You may be able to help your faculty get over the barrier of doing more work by helping them to work differently rather than just doing more.
  4. Are you serving Sakai content to students abroad? Be mindful that some computers outside the US may not have all the media players you're used to using.
  5. Is information literacy an issue for your campus? Work with your faculty to integrate info lit assignments directly into their Sakai courses as part of their disciplinary assignments.
  6. Try using Sakai's wiki tool to create tutorials and research guides. And yes – let faculty and students edit the pages! This is a collaborative opportunity not to be missed, and errors can easily be corrected with the version control in the Sakai wiki tool.
  7. Embed the meebo chat tool (http://meebo.com) into an appropriate course page to provide your students with chat tools that cross the boundaries of all the proprietary instant messenger tools such as AOL, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo!.

 

The Longsight Group produces this newsletter each month on behalf of those who can take advantage of fully-supported, open source software. We provide comprehensive services for Sakai, campus portal systems, institutional repositories and more.

Longsight’s comprehensive support:

  • Project planning
  • Installation and configuration
  • Training and documentation
  • Hosting and remote management
  • Custom development and support
  • Management services for local installations
  • Troubleshooting, upgrades, security, backups
  • Data migration and integration with systems
  • Performance monitoring and assessment services

Contact Longsight for more information:

http://www.longsight.com | toll free: 866-224-5721 | information@longsight.com