New UNC-Chapel Hill Sakai Blog site!

We are pleased to report that UNC-Chapel Hill has adopted Sakai!

We are no longer a pilot and therefore have a new and improved blog available at:

• http://blog.sakai.unc.edu

Our Sakai Pilot Blog will remain available but will not be updated.

We hope to see you on the new site and thank you for your continued interest.

New Semester Checklist

Welcome back! The new year brings with it new goals and new opportunities to get organized. Here is a simple checklist to help you ease into your new semester.

1. Customize your site tabs (remove or hide sites you no longer use)

2. Know where to get help (choose “Sakai Support”)

3a. Instructors: Publish course sites to make them available to students.

• Go to: Site Info > Manage Access > (click “Publish” and “Update”)

3b. Students: Confirm current courses using Sakai & bookmark: http://sakaipilot.unc.edu

We look forward to serving you this year!

NYU Demo of Sakai Open Academic Environment

We’ve been tracking Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) progress (formerly known as Sakai 3; see project plans here) and thought you’d be interested in a recent announcement.

On November 5,  2010, New York University launched the first pre-release pilot of the Sakai OAE — a revolutionary platform for academic networking and collaboration. The NYU instance will be known as the ATLAS Network (Advanced Teaching, Learning, And Scholarship Network). The pilot will grow to include 5,000 students and faculty from six different NYU schools.

Below is a 13-minute screencast of their implementation.

The NYU pilot focuses on two important areas of need.

1. It provides a single NYU network for many diverse university communities to use.
2. And it provides a flexible set of options for implementing portfolios.

Features include:

• searchable profiles,
• group spaces and uploaded content, and
• two portfolio implementations.

The pilot is being overseen by a cross-school, academic-led committee charged with oversight of the development and implementation of the Sakai OAE environment at NYU. Initial funding for Sakai at NYU was provided by a 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant.

It’s exciting to see the work of so many come together! Congrats!

A look back at the UNC Sakai Pilot (2007-2010)

In their book, Implementing Change: Patterns, Principles and Potholes, Gene Hall and Shirley Hord identify ten principles that have been observed repeatedly when organizations and people are engaged in change.

One principle is: Change is a process, not an event.

We thought it might be useful, then, to look back at the earliest beginnings of the Sakai Pilot at UNC starting in February 2007 through to today. Seeing the process from this vantage point highlights the efforts of many who were able to try, to learn, to do, and to change over time. The combination of your efforts helped to create the timeline below. As always, thank you!

The UNC Sakai Pilot: A Retrospective
(3 years in 3 minutes)

Micro-tutorial: Upload multiple files to Resources

We’ve shown how to upload/download multiple resources using WebDAV before (Recall “Map a Drive for Windows & Mac”), but there is another way to quickly upload multiple files to your Sakai site. Here’s how in three easy steps.(Click on an image to enlarge it in a new window.)

Step 1: Go to Resources > Add > “Upload files”

Step 2:  “Add Another File”

Step 3: “Upload Files Now”

Note: You can also opt to notify your site members by email that there are new files in the site.

You can try this for yourself using Resources in your My Workspace area.

That’s all there is to it!

A 1-up for UNC

Last week, the Daily Tarheel reported that the ITS Executive Steering Committee passed a motion to begin a three-year transition to Sakai. This is a big 1-up for the pilot and for our campus. We look forward to working with faculty, staff and students to listen, learn, and leverage the wealth of expertise that exists at UNC. We are already seeing creative innovations spread through departments (we will share those with you here soon).  This change also brings new opportunities to connect with the Sakai community and the great work being done on Sakai 2.x as well as on the Open Academic Environment (formerly Sakai 3). It is an exciting time for learning and collaboration @ UNC!

In case you missed them, here are some recent articles from the DTH:

• ITS votes to transition from Blackboard to Sakai by 2014
• Sakai a safe bet: A cheaper alternative to Blackboard, Sakai accomplishes more for less
• Educators compare Sakai, Blackboard systems
• Switch from Blackboard to Sakai a good move

Micro-tutorial: Copy & Paste Files Across Sakai Sites

One of the benefits of Sakai is that it allows you to upload a file once and easily move it within or across your sites.

Whether you are a student, faculty or staff member, this tip is useful and simple. Take a minute (literally) to find out how!

We tip our hats to the Carolina Digital Story Lab for inspiring us to embed this tutorial in a hypothetical mini-story. You can learn more about this innovative student group @ http://www.uncstorylab.org/.

Sakai & Professional Development

What makes the Sakai Community unique is the generosity and contributions of its members — from all areas of the globe. Sakai Conferences provide a great opportunity to connect with colleagues, generate new ideas, and see how others have solved problems or are employing innovative techniques. Planning is underway for a Sakai Regional Conference in Atlanta for Spring 2011 and you are invited to participate:

• http://tinyurl.com/sakai-atlanta2011
  Join in the planning and consider submitting proposals when the call goes out!

Below is a clip of Rob Moore, UNC School of Government talking about his experience at his first Sakai Conference in Denver, June 2010.

If budgets are tight and travel is not an option, there are many ways to participate right now. Do you have accessibility expertise to share? An interest in mobile learning? Perhaps the Distance Learning subgroup of the Teaching and Learning discussion group is where you can not only learn from others but also give your time and talents to the collective.

We invite you to consider how you can contribute, learn, and grow professionally in the process.

Learning, adapting and improving

In the past month, we have had two events which caused many Fall 2010 courses to become temporarily inaccessible. One occurred this morning–ouch. These events were more than inconvenient for our pilot community. We apologize for the interruption and anxiety these events may have caused you. We shared your stress.

Therefore, we ask for your patience as we work through this period of integration adjustment. At the root cause of the problem are scripts that handle updates and changes to course and enrollment information.  There are some changes that we have been unable to predict. When this happens, interruptions result. As unexpected changes emerge over time, we need to adapt and modify our scripts to address issues so that moving forward, service remains steady and uninterrupted.

Our commitment to you is that we will continue to improve our processes so that interruptions diminish over time and hopefully, become negligible. We will document and respond to unexpected issues as they arise in an effort to prevent them from reoccurring. We will keep you informed via the Sakai Gateway page (http://sakaipilot.unc.edu) and this blog, and will respond to your help requests in a timely manner.

We ask for your continued support and proactive notification of issues as we work collectively through this period of adjustment. Thank you on behalf of the UNC Sakai Support team.

Fall 2010: A Summary of Pilot Growth

With the semester in full-swing, we wanted to share with you a summary of the pilot numbers. As of this writing there are approximately 215 official university courses using Sakai with more than 5,000 students enrolled.  Since the Spring term, more than 1,000 new people have come on board - mainly from the School of Medicine. Welcome!

(Remember those School of Medicine faculty videos about Building Community and Using the Calendar Tool?)

Thank you for your participation. We look forward to sharing the innovations in teaching and learning that will emerge this semester.