Thank you for trying Sakai

Trying new things requires effort, determination, and time. We appreciate all you have done to try Sakai — whether you are a regular user or someone who peeked in to see the environment.

Each of you has made a unique contribution to the UNC Sakai Pilot:  Thank you.

You are in excellent company. Nearly 850 colleagues as of July 1, 2010 were enrolled in Sakai as an Instructor, Teaching Assistant (for course sites) or Organizer (for project sites).

Thank you for your time and efforts! We welcome your continued feedback.

Sakai upgraded to version 2.7! Take a peek…

If you have been using Sakai for a while—or even if you are brand new—there are several goodies in this version to discover.  We’ll highlight a few below to get you started and will continue to spotlight new features over the coming weeks.

NEW! Message Center Notifications

When you log into Sakai, you land in “MyWorkspace.” You will now see “Message Center Notifications.” At a glance, you can view and access all of your new, unread messages–in all of your sites. Just click on the envelope to jump directly to the new, unread info! (Click all images to enlarge.)

NEW! Profile2 Tool

This is fun! Go to your MyWorkspace tab and click on Profile. If you hover over the right-side of a topic, you’ll see an edit button display. This causes a form to appear that you can fill out. There is Twitter integration if you choose and other Privacy settings for you to control how others in Sakai will see your profile. Happy explorations!

NEW! Blogs

Want to use blogging in your classes but not sure how to begin? It’s easy to use the Blogs tool in Sakai. The default settings are set to make the blogs publicly available (each person’s blog has its own RSS feed). However, if you want to use blogs as private journals or just make accessible to class members, you can modify the permissions so only those people who should see the content and comment are able to do so! A few classes have used blogging successfully and we hope to have video interviews posted soon.

Reminder: With any upgrade, we expect some oddities to emerge. Please report any strange behavior quickly so we can resolve issues for you, your students, colleagues and friends. Thank you in advance for your help!

Using Sakai to Serve Up Your Course Web Sites

We have creative faculty who like developing web pages for courses. Sometimes course pages are publicly accessible while others are password-protected. For years, faculty have used the Course Web Space Tool to do this. Unfortunately, the tool is being retired but we are pleased to offer Sakai as an alternative.

• See an example of a BIOLOGY 101 course web site that is publicly available to you but hosted on a Sakai site.  (At the bottom of this post, you can see the actual URL — it’s long!)

Here’s a 1-minute “big picture” overview of what’s involved.

The videos below, demonstrate how you can use Sakai as a way to serve up your own course web pages.

There are a few considerations:

• You have your web site files stored in a single folder
• You don’t mind having students log into Sakai -or- have a long URL (see below)
• You are fearless with a can-do attitude (We salute you!)

See our playlist of short videos each about 1 minute in length. Wow! Six minutes of free professional development!

As promised, here is the URL containing our sample BIOL 101 course site:

• https://sakaipilot.unc.edu/access/content/group/52b150c8-6e07-4112-9b8b-645b4867df92/public/BIOL 101/index.html

If you are faculty who used to use the Course Web Space Tool, we’re here to help you make the transition! Simply call 962-HELP or open a Help Request for “Sakai Support.”

Advanced tutorials:

• Taking it to the next level (learn to hide menu items, create a TinyURL, view as a student, and create a class listserv!)
• Making changes (decide where the “canonical source” of your web site files will reside and then drag and drop as appropriate; edit your HTML pages as you normally would!)