Management. open source community experience distilled. Sakai CLE Courseware. The Official Guide. experience to new level

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1 Sakai CLE Courseware Management The Official Guide Take your e-learning, research, and collaboration experience to new level Alan Berg Ian Dolphin PUBLISHING open source community experience distilled BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

2 Preface 1 Chapter 1: What is Sakai? 7 Sakai tools 8 The Sakai Foundation 9 Sakai worksite 11 The community 13 Branches 13 Workgroups 14 Developers 14 Rogues Gallery 15 Sakai's academic background 16 A brief history 17 The Java-based tool creation 17 Sakai Present day 18 What's Next? The Sakai open academic environment 19 Advantages for organizations Chapter 2: Feet First: Running the Demo 23 Installing the demo 24 Administrator's account 27 Expanding the demo 28 Help is your friend 29 Live demos 31 Building from the source 32 34

3 Chapter 3: Sakai 2.x Anatomy The Sakai framework The aggregation layer The presentation layer The tools layer 40 The services layer 40 Core technologies 41 How Sakai is deployed at scale 43 Load balancing Frontend servers Database preferences The Java Virtual Machine 48 Enterprise data integration 49 Sakai OAE anatomy 50 Architectural overview 51 Client-side anatomy ("3akai-ux") Nakamura server-side anatomy ("Nakamura") 53 Chapter 4: My First Site 55 Tool-specific help 57 Managing project sites 58 Browsing the demonstration 58 Site creation 61 Creating a course site 64 Tools of immediate value 71 Maintaining your site details 75 Starter tips 78 Descriptions are important 78 Password strength 78 The motivation for sections 79 Creating sections Chapter 5: Enterprise Bundle Tools and Quality Assurance 83 Using Core tools in Sakai Core tools since Sakai From Contrib to Provisional 86 Stealthily to Core 90 Enterprise-level quality 92 The Quality Assurance process 93 QA leads

4 Maintenance releases 95 Automated testing 96 Automatic code analysis Chapter 6: Worksite Tools 105 Creating flashcards 106 Commonalities between tools 109 The Resources tool 114 Using course tools together 117 The context 118 Making a communication plan 119 Placing Content 119 Assessing individual students 120 Introducing Portfolios 120 Towards OSP integration in Sakai OAE Chapter 7: Contributed Tools 127 An apology of sorts 128 The range of contributed tools 128 Sponsoring creativity 128 Pros and cons 129 A list of tools 130 Example deployments 133 The University of Michigan 135 Interview with David Haines, Senior Developer at Michigan 138 The University of Cape Town 139 Creating tools 141 Building tools 141 SASH 143 Interview with Steven Githens, the force behind SASH Chapter 8: Putting Sakai to Work 147 The tools and structure of a Sakai site 147 Sakai's site structure 148 My Workspace 148 The Home tool contents 150 The basic collaboration tools 151 Site administration 152 The basic teaching and learning tools 153 [iii]

5 Types of Sakai sites 154 Problem-based courses 155 Small discussion courses 156 Large introductory courses 158 Project-based courses 161 Collaboration sites 161 Building your Home page 162 Check out the new look 163 Edit your page 163 Replace the site description 163 Customize the Home page 164 Ready to roll Chapter 9: The Administration Workspace 169 What is a Sakai administrator? 169 The Administration tool set 171 Basic concepts 176 Internal ID 177 Java 178 Realms 183 sakai.properties 187 An interview with Anthony Atkins Chapter 10: Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise 193 Protocols 195 Playing with Telnet 195 Installing TCPMON 196 Requests and returned status codes 198 SOAP 200 JSON 201 REST 202 Existing web services 203 Recapping terminology 203 Default web services 204 Sakai and SOAP 207 My first web service 207 My first client 208 A more realistic client example 208 Entity Broker 209

6 Finding descriptions of services 210 Authenticating 213 A client-side coding example 213 Interview with author Aaron Zeckoski, the author of Entity Broker 214 WSRP 215 Chapter 11: Tips from the Trenches 219 The benefits of knowing that frameworks exist 219 Using the third-party frameworks 220 The benefit of using Spring 220 Hibernate for database coupling 221 The many Apache frameworks 222 Looking at dependencies An expanded tour of Java 226 Introduction 226 Profiling using JMX 229 The Apache web server 232 Migration 233 Migrating course content 233 A bit of history 233 Enabling LMS content import 235 A note about IMS Common Cartridge 236 Using "Import from File" 236 Interviews at the deep end 237 Megan May Seth Theriault 240 David Howitz Chapter 12: Understanding Common Error Messages 245 A policy of containment of errors 246 Reporting Quality Assurance analysis Production systems Configuring logging Common error messages Java version Port issues 253 Out of memory 254 The portal The database

7 Search 258 sakai.properties 259 File permissions 260 Class not found 261 Information sources Chapter 13: Show Cases 265 Acknowledgements 266 CamTools: Using Sakai to support teaching and learning in a research-intensive university 267 About the authors 267 CamTools: Sakai at the University of Cambridge 268 Evidence-informed approaches to virtual learning environment development: the case of Plant Sciences 271 New directions 273 the University of Amsterdam 273 About the author 274 About the University 274 E-learning 275 The SURF Foundation 275 UvA communities-a Sakai collaboration environment 276 Web Klassen 277 Conflict Studies 277 IIS Communities 278 The Hague Forum for Judicial Expertise 278 Project site 278 Testweeklab 278 Digital Portfolio a different use case 279 Why Sakai? 279 University of Michigan 279 Sakai success story 280 Transforming the education experience 281 Supporting the dissertation process 281 Streamlining academic administration 282 Future directions 283 UFP-UV: UFP in the Sakai project 283 Abstract 283 Introduction 283 Sakai usage, full adoption 285 The current Sakai skin at UFP 286 The UFP tools 286 Sakai usage at UFP 288

8 September January Table of Contents Concurrent users during January September Up to September, Marist College and Sakai 289 Background The commercial partner implementation model 290 Migrating a campus to Sakai 291 Tangible outcomes 293 rsmart 294 Overview 294 History 295 Easy to adopt 296 Easy to try 297 Crossing the border into research: A case study of students' engagement with a virtual research environment 298 About the authors 298 Background 299 Tutor engagement 300 Data collection 301 Student engagement Key themes Conclusions and recommendations 303 SOLO Taking e-learning offline 304 About the author 304 Background Internet bandwidth and cost 305 North-West University (South Africa) 305 How Solo works 308 The LAMP Consortium like a bundle of sticks 308 About the author 309 Introducing the project Award winning Winning factors The LAMP experience Criminology a distance course in Sakai 313 About the authors 313 The Department of Criminology 314 Description of the distance course 315 Experiences Lessons learned 316 Clarifying the structure of a course 316 The importance of the group 316 The social space

9 The absence of feedback 318 The need of support 318 Future development 318 Conclusion Chapter 14: Innovating Teaching and Learning with Sakai 321 The Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award 322 Case studies from the winner's circle 's First place winner: Biomedical Engineering (University of Michigan, USA) 324 Course description 324 Course development and delivery 325 Teaching innovation 329 Innovation snapshot: Forensic science goes online 332 Project overview 332 How Sakai was used 333 Implications for Teaching and Learning 334 Lesson learned 's Second place winner: International Law (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 334 Course description 335 Course development and delivery 336 Teaching innovation 341 Innovation Snapshot: Facebook meets history 342 Project overview 343 How Sakai was used 343 Impact on teaching and learning 344 Lessons learned 344 Conclusions 345 Passive versus active learning 346 Teacher-centered versus student-centered learning 346 Less innovative versus more innovative uses of tools Chapter 15: A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional Management 349 Introduction 349 Context 350 The University's IT department 350 The challenges of a shared service center 352 Educational systems and administrative systems 354 Open source at the IC 355 Introduction 355 Success with uportal and CAS 356

10 Sakai on the fringes 357 Sakai at UvA 357 An interview with the director Chapter 16: Participating in the Sakai Community 365 The Sakai Foundation 366 Consensus building 366 The Foundation acting as the legal home 367 Partnering up 368 The community 370 DoOcracy 371 Transparent communication 372 Conferences 372 Collab - Mailing Lists 374 Work Groups 375 Asynchronous communication 377 Open code, Open Standards 378 The QA network 384 The risk of information loss 384 The current wish list Chapter 17: Looking Ahead: Sakai OAE 389 Early experiments and functional principles 390 Sakai OAE 392 Managing the project to build the new environment 394 Educators' input Appendix A: Terminology 397 Appendix B: Resources 405 Sakai Foundation support 405 The community 406 Best practices 407 Training material 408 Tools 408 Index 411