Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Chapter 1: What Is Sakai?
  • Sakai tools
  • The Sakai Foundation
  • Sakai worksite
  • The community
    • Branches
    • Workgroups
    • Developers
  • Roots
  • A brief history
    • Sakai 1.0
    • Present day
  • Advantages for organizations
  • Summary

• Chapter 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

• Chapter 3: Sakai 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
  • Summary

• Chapter 4: My First Project Site
  • Tool-specific help
  • Managing project sites
    • Browsing the demonstration
    • Site creation
  • Tools of immediate value
    • Maintaining your site details
  • Summary

• Chapter 5: Your First Course Site
  • Creating a course site using the Sakai demo
  • Starter tips
    • Descriptions are important
    • Password strength
    • Becoming another user quickly
    • The motivation for sections
    • Creating sections
  • Summary

• Chapter 6: Enterprise Bundle Tools & Quality Assurance
  • Core tools in Sakai 2.6
  • Contrib to Provisional
  • Stealthily to Core
  • Enterprise-level quality
    • The Quality Assurance process
    • Maintenance releases
    • The automated testing
  • Automatic code analysis
  • Summary

• Chapter 7: Worksite Tools
  • A flashcard activity
  • Commonalities between tools
  • The Resources tool
  • Course tools
    • Context
    • Communication plan
    • Content
    • Assessing individual students
  • Introducing Portfolios
  • Portfolio expert interviewed
  • Summary

• Chapter 8: 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
    • Sakai Electronic Lab Notebook for Research and Groupwork (SENRG)
    • SASH
      • Interview with Steven Githens, the force behind SASH
    • AppBuilder
  • Sousa—Content authoring and delivery for Sakai
    • What is Sousa?
    • An Interview with Mark Norton
  • Edia
    • What is Edia?
    • Skin Manager
    • Sakai Maps
    • Fedora tool
    • Web course tool
  • Open Syllabus
  • Summary

• Chapter 9: 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

• Chapter 10: 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
  • Adding a Portfolio template
    • The Portfolio administration site
    • OpenEd
  • Summary

• Chapter 11: 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 Entity Broker author Aaron Zeckoski
  • WSRP
  • Summary

• Chapter 12: Tips from the Trenches
  • The benefits of knowing that frameworks exist
  • Third-party frameworks
    • Spring
    • Hibernate
    • Apache frameworks
    • Dependencies
  • Expanded tour of Java
    • Introduction
    • JMX monitoring
  • 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
  • Functional administration
  • Summary

• Chapter 13: 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

• Chapter 14: 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
  • Summary
  • Sakai @ the University of Amsterdam
    • About the author
    • About the University
    • E-learning
    • The SURF Foundation
    • UvA communities, a Sakai collaboration environment
      • Webklassen
      • Conflict Studies
      • IIS Communities
      • The Hague Forum for Judicial Expertise
      • Project sites
      • 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
    • About the authors
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • Sakai usage, full adoption
    • The UFP tools
    • Sakai usage at UFP
  • 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: Students' engagement with a Virtual Research Environment, a case study
    • About the authors
    • Background
    • Tutor engagement
    • Data collection
    • Student engagement
    • Key themes
    • Conclusions and recommendations
    • References
  • 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

• Chapter 15: Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai
  • The Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award
  • Case studies from the winner's circle
    • 1st Place Winner: Biomedical Engineering (University of Michigan, USA)
      • Course description
      • Course development and delivery
      • Teaching innovation
    • 2nd Place Winner: International Law (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
      • Course description
      • Course development and delivery
      • Teaching innovation
  • Conclusions and lessons learned
  • Summary
  • References

• Chapter 16: A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional Management
  • 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 & CAS
    • Sakai on the fringes
  • Sakai at UvA
  • An interview with the Director
  • Summary

• Chapter 17: Participating in the Sakai Community
  • The Sakai Foundation
    • Consensus building
    • Legal home
    • Partnering up
  • The community
  • DoOcracy
  • Transparent communication
    • Conferences
    • Collab
    • Work Groups
    • Asynchronous communication
    • Open code, Open Standards
    • The QA network
    • The risk of information loss
    • The current wish list
  • An interview with a member of the community
  • Summary

• Chapter 18: Rogues Gallery
  • If the Sakai community were a person
  • Sakai fellows
    • Dr Ian Boston
    • Clay Fenlason
    • Nuno Fernandes
    • Steven Githens
    • David Howitz
    • Beth Kirschner
    • Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch
    • Stephen Marquard
    • Seth Theriault
    • Zach A Thomas
    • Aaron Zeckoski
  • Foundation members
    • Michael Korcuska
    • Peter Knoop
    • Mary Miles
    • Pete Peterson
    • Anthony Whyte
  • Developers
    • Nicolaas Matthijs
    • Ray Davis
  • Quality assurers
    • Jean-François
    • Megan May
  • The rest
    • Chris Coppola
    • John Leasia
    • John Norman
    • Mark Norton
    • Charles Severance
    • Margaret Wagner

• Chapter 19: Looking Ahead: Sakai 3
  • Sakai 3 goals
  • Sakai 3 for users
    • Moving beyond sites
    • Breaking the tool silos
    • Social networking
    • Content creation and organization
  • Sakai 3 for technologists
  • Interview with Sakai 3 chief architect
  • Summary

• Index

Alan Berg

Michael Korcuska

This is a truly large book. Large not so much in pages but in ideas and complexity of purpose.

If you are looking to get a sense of what Sakai is, how it works, what its like to adopt the platform and participate in the community and how to get started on installing, running and using the software, then this book will do the job.

Sample chapters

You can view our sample chapters and prefaces of this title on PacktLib or download sample chapters in PDF format.

Find your book in our support section to find errata and to download code samples.