Sakai Project Sites for Collaboration: A Demonstration

You are invited to attend a Sakai Project Site demo! Seating is limited to 20 so please register.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Saunders 322
10:30 - 11:45 am

or

Monday, January 5, 2009
Saunders 322
10:30-11:45 am

Learn how you can use Sakai Project Sites to:

• streamline committee work for academic programs or new hires,
• collect evidence for accreditation purposes,
• collaborate with editors on book chapters and manuscripts,
• track work you are conducting for grant purposes,
• manage organization communications and documents,
• conduct research with colleagues at other institutions.

If you wish to pilot Sakai for project collaboration, we ask only that you participate in the formal assessment of how well it worked for you!

University of Delaware migrates to Sakai

The University of Delaware has an excellent web site that provides the basics on how/why Sakai, facts and figures, faculty examples, and training materials.

• Learning Management System Project Site
• Faculty Examples
• Faculty Training Website

Here is a link to Professor Fred Hofstetter’s Demonstration Video (26 mins) that he presented to the LMS Committee advocating Sakai. One of his courses received an Honorable Mention at the 2008 Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award.

He also gave a great presentation at the Sakai Regional Conference entitled, “Selecting Sakai Tools Based on How People Learn.”

Sakai Regional Conference @ VT

Virginia Tech’s tagline is “Invent the future” - a major theme of this conference.

It has been a great opportunity to network with colleagues from peer institutions like Virginia Tech, Georgetown, UC Davis, U Penn, Georgia, Yale and many more.

Michael Korcuska, the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, gave the keynote in which he outlined exciting future directions including Sakai 3.0 (wow - you have to see it!) as well as identified the challenges currently under the microscope.

UNC Chapel Hill was represented in a panel presentation entitled, “Planning, Pilot Programs and Production: A Panel.” We shared the stage with Virginia Tech, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech and University of Georgia and talked about common challenges as well as successful strategies used at our schools.

The focus of this conference is pedagogy rather than software development. It’s encouraging to see so many others engaged in teaching, learning, and faculty/user support. A new teaching award competition was announced. The deadline for submissions is 2/27/09.

The prolific use of Sakai project sites for accreditation purposes was a bit of a surprise to me — but has worked very successfully for others. Perhaps worth exploring at Chapel Hill?