Sakai Big Idea #5: Group-aware Tools

This is the last in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

Group-aware tools can be a new concept for many of us — one that is very powerful!

Group-aware tools allow an Instructor (or site Organizer) to streamline communications with multiple groups of people within a single site. Furthermore, those groups can have their own sets of private collaboration tools to self-organize as they wish!

There are two key points to keep in mind:

1. Groups can refer to Sections (course sections automatically created from the Registrar/Student Information System) or groups that you create manually.
2. Your site has to be populated with people before you can manually create groups and “release” tools to them.

This 4-minute video should help explain…

The list of group-aware tools in our Sakai 2.6 environment includes:

• Announcements
• Assignments
• Calendar
• Discussions & Private Messages
• Forums
• Gradebook
• Messages
• Resources
• Roster
• Site Statistics
• Tests & Quizzes

Sakai Big Idea #4: Public vs. Private Content

This is the fourth in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

In a single Sakai site, you can have content that is private to the site members only while making other content publicly viewable.

Why might you want to do this? What are the advantages?

You can…

• Streamline management of materials: all content is located within a single site
• Serve multiple audiences with a single site
  • Grant evaluators, reviewers, experts in your field, class project sponsors, etc.
• Publish selected materials for public review and consumption
• Keep sensitive data private and protected

See it in action in under 3 minutes!

Tell us how you’re using the public content functionality! We want to share your good ideas with others on our campus.

Sakai Big Idea #3: Permissions

This is the third in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

You can change permissions. You have roles in your site such as Instructor role, Student role, Tech Support role, and so on.  Each role has an associated “bundle” of permissions. Whenever you see the Permissions option on a tool (Big Idea #2), you can change the permissions associated with a role.

This means you can enable students to contribute more to your course site — whether that is by creating and sharing content, adding announcements, working in groups, and more! (See Craig Carroll’s video about student-generated content.)

Further, for those who want it, there is a lot of control to tweak permissions at a very fine-grained level. Our pilot faculty really like the flexibility of permissions. (See this video of Barbara Wildemuth, Professor in SILS, discussing permissions streamlining committee collaboration).

Only 2 more ideas left to go: public vs. private content and group-aware tools!

Big Idea #2: Tools are managed at the tool level

This is the second in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

Tools are managed at the tool level — and we have choices! Click on a menu item/tool, and you will see a bar display under the title that provides options for managing it. However, the fun part is that you have choices as an individual — and there are choices at the institutional level.

There is a large set of tools to choose from (see video below) and you can select as many or as few as you like. But there are also choices at the institutional level about which tools to support and how to customize Sakai.  Perhaps UNC will want to add and support “contrib” tools (like OpenSyllabus) that are not in our current list — or maybe UNC will opt to support only one of the testing tools.

Having choices is good!

Big Idea #1: My Workspace

This is the first in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

You have your own private workspace area where you can upload, save, create, and move files. You can also view all of your sites’ combined announcements and calendar events. (Students report that these features get two enthusiastic thumbs-up.)

To learn more, see the 3-minute screencast below (for best results, make it full-screen). You can try this today by logging into http://sakaipilot.unc.edu

Sakai: 5 Big Ideas

We have found that most people have an “a-ha” moment about ways Sakai is different from other collaboration/LMS software once we walk through 5 Big Ideas together.

Therefore, on this blog, we will take a brief tour of each idea, one-by-one. We believe that once you “get” the big picture, you will be compelled to start thinking about the innovative and concrete ways you can use Sakai to streamline your work!  Here is a sneak peek at at all five.

[My Workspace] [Tools] [Permissions] [Public v. Private] [Group-Aware]