Building Community in Medical School Courses with Sakai

[This is a guest entry from Brian Moynihan, Program Manager & Sakai Lead at UNC School of Medicine. Thanks, Brian!]

One of the things that faculty have enjoyed about using Sakai at the UNC School of Medicine is its ability to bring faculty and students together as a community.

Many features of Sakai work on the principle of bringing community together. For instance the ability to see student pictures in the roster and in the discussion forums have helped faculty learn their students’ names and connect a personality with a student’s post.

Because many tools in Sakai are group-aware, it becomes easy to email a group of people in the course or to create a forum specifically for a small group section. These tools can thus provide a friendly, dynamic way to foster group cohesion and cooperation.

In this video Dr. Kurt Gilliland and Dr. Ed Kernick, co-directors of a first year medical school course with 160 students, discuss the ways that Sakai enabled collaboration in and out of the classroom.