UNC Sakai Pilot Evaluation: Results Summary

When we published the Sakai Pilot Evaluation Final Report, we knew that most people would prefer a visual summary rather than reading the 74-page document or even the Executive Summary. We hope that the 15-slide summary below will do just that. For the nitty-gritty details, however, please see the report.

Managing 43 course sections? Sakai saves you time!

Dr. Anastacia Kohl is a Spanish course coordinator in the Department of Romance Languages. Like the coordinators mentioned in an earlier post, she found that:

Sakai has already saved me a lot of time and a lot of hassle. It’s made my job a lot easier. I’m a big fan of Sakai. I would not want to go back to Blackboard after having used it.

She notes, however, that it will be important to address instructors’ reluctance to change - since change is difficult for all of us.

I think Sakai is going to be a very useful tool in the future — it already has been — and I’m excited about using it again in the Spring.

What 3 Spanish Course Coordinators Say About Sakai

In an earlier blog post, we mentioned that the number of students using Sakai this term is 7 times what it was last Spring. Several Romance Languages faculty opted to use Sakai for their large enrollment, multi-section courses. They are the first group at UNC to use Sakai with multiple sections.

Advantages of Sakai for large-enrollment, multi-section courses:

• 1 Sakai site per large enrollment course (i.e., SPAN 105)
• Shared content ensures consistency across diverse sections
• Multiple sections employ “group-aware” tools so students & instructors see only their own section information
• Course coordinators see all section information.

Below are the stories of three course coordinators who are responsible for the overall management of course content, instructors, and students in selected Spanish courses. Hear what Bill Maisch, Hosun Kim and Josefa Lindquist have to say. Three coordinators in three minutes!

Sakai Pilot Evaluation Final Report available

We are pleased to announce that the Sakai Pilot Final Report is available for your review!  The 74-page PDF (3.2 MB) provides a wealth of data collected during Fall 2008 and Spring 2009.

Spoiler alert: below is an excerpt from the Executive Summary.

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.

While we work on a summary slideshow, we invite you to download and read the report here.

We’d also like to acknowledge and express our sincere appreciation to all of the faculty, staff, students and administrators who contributed their time, energy, resources, and support to make the pilot happen. Thank you.

Fall ‘09 Courses In Progress

It’s been a busy start to the semester. We have approximately 3,500 faculty and students using Sakai right now! (Last year, we had about 500 students enrolled in official UNC courses each semester. See the updated numbers here.)

So, what changed?

This year, some Spanish and French faculty decided to use Sakai to help coordinate and manage multiple sections (think: 40) within a single course site. In one course site, there are 960 students — each enrolled in a section of ~22 others taught by an instructor who only sees his or her students. All students and faculty can share a common set of instructional materials in a single location, while conducting their routine course and collaboration activities within their own private section. This is a great example of the value of Sakai’s “group-aware tools.” We hope to share more details about their unique story soon!

However, we are honored to share with you a set of videos created by Rob Moore to help Romance Language faculty learn more about Sakai’s special features. Check them out when you have a chance!

https://flrcvideos.unc.edu/publicvideos.php

Photo courtesy of Muffet:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/1672803335/

A new Sakai environment for UNC

For the past year, many of you have tried Sakai for courses, committees, projects, and research. Thank you for your contributions to this project! We learned many things about Sakai, but more importantly we learned about our unique campus needs. Below, Asst. Professor Phil Edwards talks more about this and his interest in Sakai.

In order to be able to customize Sakai in the future if our campus wishes to, we have migrated to a new, 100% “native Sakai” environment.

This means your sites may look a little different than before. It also means you have some new tools! We hope you like the new Page Order tool.

FREE: The Future of a Radical Price (& other free things)

Chris Anderson’s latest book, FREE, is available for free on GoogleBooks or on iTunes as an audiobook. It’s an interesting read (and listen) and presents many concepts related to software, copyright, pricing, and open source that are worth thinking and talking about.

In general, he highlights the counter-intuitive changes that occur when the price of anything becomes near-zero, and provides plenty of examples to support this claim. Getting close to or at free can be good, because then we can “afford to waste” those ideas, products, services or bits. (Wasting is using them in unintended ways for unintended purposes. In instructional systems/design, this is also called Subversive Use and Volatile Design; pdf).

When “waste” is affordable, innovations occur.

Of Alan Kay, the well-known Xerox PARC engineer, Anderson writes,

What Kay realized was that a technologist’s job is not to figure out what technology is good for. Instead it is to make technology so cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous that anybody can use it, so that it propagates around the world and into every possible niche. We, the users, will figure out what to do with it, because each of us is different: different needs, different ideas, different knowledge, and different ways of interacting with the world.

Consider the incredible explosion of free or near-free web 2.0 applications as well as the growth of flourishing open source communities like Sakai, Creative Commons and the Open Educational Resources movement. If software, ideas, content, and services become free (both in terms of monetary value as well as licensing restrictions), what innovations (and positive social impact) may result? What does all of this have to do with the LMS?

We certainly don’t have all the answers but we invite you to join us on the journey in learning more!

To that end, you are invited to a (free!) Educause Live webinar on August 5: Selecting and Implementing a Course Management System for Your Campus. Three guests will speaking about Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai. Learn how others are using learning management systems or “collaborative learning environments” to enhance the mission of their universities. (Registration is required.)

Update from the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston

Last week,  more than 500 people attended the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston, MA from July 8-10. Of those attending, 40% were first-time attendees. The keynote speaker was Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean and Director, Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, MIT–and co-author of the book, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. (Get the book!)

For those inquisitive, interested people unable to attend, there are many ways to experience the conference vicariously! “Citizen Journalists” interviewed presenters & new attendees now posted on YouTube, parts of the conference were streamed, slides are available on Slideshare, flickr photos are tagged with “sakai09″ and wiki pages host materials and follow-up notes. You can find all of these and more at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF10/10th+Sakai+Conference.

If you have 3 minutes, you can hear what Paul and Karen had to say!

Sakai 3: Improved Visual Design

Want to see the new visual design mockups for Sakai 3 wireframes?

Here is a sample for a GeorgiaTech dashboard. You can learn more about this initiative at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/3AK/3akai+Visual+Design

Find out about GeorgiaTech’s implementation of Sakai (called T-Square) at their Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning.

Sakai Summer Reading List

While you are sunning on the beach, you’ll surely want to catch up on these Top 5 recommended Sakai reads:

1. UNC’s Sakai Pilot Results (6.09)
2. Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide (6.09)
3. Sakai Executive Brief (PDF; 5.09)
4. Sakai Foundation Exec. Director’s blog entry about the UNC Sakai Pilot! (6.09)
5. Oracle Academic Enterprise White Paper (1.09)

Enjoy!