 ‘Students, faculty and staff require a good return on their IT dollars while supporting the frontiers of new forms of E-learning and E-service delivery. This is the right time for a project like Sakai to make coordinated development feasible.’ —Brad Wheeler, Associate Vice President for Research and Academic Computing |
A venture to create open-source course management tools and related software for the higher education community has been launched with a $2.4 million grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation
IU is one of the four university partners with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Michigan, in what is called the Sakai Project.
The four institutions will contribute services worth at least an additional $4 million over the next two years. The participants will direct that amount of their individual annual investment in information technology into a single, synchronized effort under the direction of a board that will direct Sakai activities.
The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) and the uPortal/Java Architectures Special Interest Group consortium round out the partners participating in the project. All participants have agreed to adopt for their individual institutions a common educational technology created to a Sakai standard.
“The Sakai Project represents significant innovation in
software development for higher education,” said Joseph Hardin,
director of the project, chairman of the Sakai board and director
of the Collaborative Technologies Laboratory at Michigan.
“The university partners have agreed to vest the Sakai board
with decision-making authority over the substantial resources
that they otherwise would direct to individual in-house efforts.
The leadership position of these universities, the level of
resources being pooled and the commitment to adopt a common
set of tools within two years make this a landmark effort.“
The Sakai Project
• Sakai will make available a complete course management system that incorporates the best features of the participants’ existing systems and experiences. A course management system is a set of tools that faculty create and use to post course requirements, provide readings, give out assignments, carry out assessments and perform other classroom management functions.
• Universities will access the Sakai software via an enhanced version of the popular uPortal system now in wide use by universities and businesses, and have the ability to choose the course management components they wish to make available to their campuses, offering additional types of university services via the portal. Individual users will be able to configure the site to their own preferences.
• A third Sakai product will consist of tools that support research by giving faculty colleagues the means to collaborate across the network, using many of the same functions offered by course management tools.
A Sakai Tool Portability Profile (TPP) will provide educational
software developers with a clearly defined reference that
gives the specifications for writing and implementing software
that is Sakai-compatible. The open-source nature of the project
will give IT professionals the ability to engage in continuous
improvement and innovation for application software, such
as that witnessed for Linux and Apache.
EPortfolio
In a related development, IU has received a $518,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to lead development of ePortfolio software, based on Sakai and O.K.I. standards. EPortfolio software will allow a student to compile a digital collection of lifelong academic work, such as reports, projects and recorded presentations, and easily tailor the material for different uses. Academic advisers will be able to view and comment on students’ work using ePortfolio. Such portfolios will provide potential employers, grant funders, academic advisers and others a much richer sense of a student’s work and skills.
IU is developing the ePortfolio software in partnership with the Open Source
Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) and the r-smart group. The initial
release of the software is expected this summer.
Sakai Project Core
The participating institutions and organizations have committed the following educational technology projects, among others, to Sakai:
• IU: Oncourse is the online course environment that allows IU faculty and students to create, integrate, use and maintain Web-based teaching and learning resources. OneStart is IU’s services-based portal.
http://oncourse.iu.edu/
http://onestart.iu.edu
• University of Michigan: The CompreHensive collaborativE Framework (CHEF) Project is developing a flexible environment for supporting distance learning and collaborative work
http://www.chefproject.org
• MIT: Stellar is an online course management and administration system that supports teaching and learning by providing an easy way for faculty to organize class materials for students, handle homework assignments and engage students in discussion using the Web.
http://stellar.mit.edu
• The O.K.I. is a collaborative project that defines a set of fundamental services for components of an educational environment use to work together, as well as with other enterprise applications.
http://web.mit.edu/oki/
• Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG): uPortal is an open standards, open-source, enterprise portal designed to the demanding standards of colleges and universities. uPortal is in use at more than 100 institutions.
http://uportal.org
• Stanford University: CourseWork is a course management system that offers a collection of tools for developing and displaying the components of a course Web site.
http://coursework.stanford.edu/
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