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

UNC @ 2010 Sakai Conference in Denver

“Blue bear” logo by Kerry O’Sullivan, ITS-TL Interactive

UNC Chapel Hill will be represented at the 2010 Sakai Conference held in Denver, Colorado from June 15-17. You are invited to keep tabs on conference happenings via the Sakai Confluence wiki.

Brian Moynihan from the School of Medicine will present, “Finding the Pulse: Choosing Sakai at the UNC School of Medicine“

Rob Moore from Romance Languages will present, “How Sakai solved the multi-section problem for Romance Languages“  & “Solving the Training and Support Problem“

Kim Eke from ITS-TL Interactive will present, “Make Your Pilot a Purple Cow: Something Worth Talking About“

Blue bears? Purple cows? Check out more presentations by our friends and colleagues from other institutions. We’ll be sure to share what we learn!

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.