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This is a page to gather together the various ideas about how to use Sakai that people have placed on the lists. This is variously thought of as "Uses of Sakai," "Project Site Uses of Sakai," "Beyond the LMS," or "Collaborative Uses of Sakai." In short, any uses of the Sakai Collaborative and learning Learning Environment that stretch beyond the typical classroom use. Feel free to reorganize or add to this page, or append materials such as talks, research papers, whatever helps us capture the variety of uses that people are putting Sakai to.
January 21, 2008
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There is a number of things that happen in smaller organizations where
Sakai becomes more of a general purpose resource - sometimes Sakai is
the only place on a small campus that everyone ends up with an account
- so Sakai effectively becomes a SSO system for a small organization.
I see Kuali Student and other Kuali projects in the future expanding
this general purpose role on small schools but for now Sakai is kind
of a beachhead in those schools.
Some schools even use Sakai as their campus "portal" - the place where
people have a personalization area - this is not their main outreach/
marketing campus page - just the main page for folks to log into.
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Via Clay Fenlason
Anecdotally I think these contribute:
- bureaucratic hurdles to getting "approval" for other lists, which
we've consciously avoided in our Sakai implementation. It's simply
easier to create a new site and add people in an ad hoc way than to
follow the steps of other campus services. If other campus services
had not been so controlling, this probably wouldn't have been
perceived as a benefit of Sakai. As it is, we have the appearance of
innovation. Hey, I'll take what we can get
- the power of a unified environment: this is the same place where
your course sites are, etc. Isn't it nicer to have all my
collaboration stuff in one place rather than navigating across several
systems?
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Via Sean DeMonner
Michigan has been tracking the evolution of project site usage on our
campus for some time now (anyone can create a project site in our
instance). In fact last Summer in Vancouver Stephanie Teasley and
Emilee Rader participated in a panel along with Wendy Morgaine Jeff
Narvid tp present some findings on the topic. Slides from that panel
are here:
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These simple tools provided a great way to organize the work of the committee and keep everyone insynch with the progress of the search. It has now been adopted for other searches too.
Posted here, not in above email thread:
Institutional Knowledge Sites – One example being graduate students self-organizing in a department to create a project site to share their materials and additional notes, in order to help future Teaching Assistants (TA's, or Graduate Student Instructors, GSI's) come up to speed on particular courses and teaching with particular instructors.
Our graduate student body is about to experience large turnover with
nearly 1/3 of us graduating in the coming months. We are in serious
danger of losing institutional knowledge on teaching. One of the
frequent complaints of GSIs in our department has been the
unavailability of past teaching materials for courses when the previous
GSI has graduated. To address this problem, we created a [USER:Sakai]
classroom repository with folders for all of the commonly taught
undergraduate courses in our department*. This repository contains
activities, labs, and other resources, forming continuity from GSI to GSI.To ensure that we don't lose valuable knowledge when you graduate, we
encourage you to take just a few minutes to visit the course repository
and upload useful information from the courses you have taught. If you
are currently a GSI, you should already have access to the site. If you
are not a GSI but would like access to upload materials, simply reply to
this email.*Keep in mind that all GSIs have accessed to these resources, so
sensitive material like keys should probably not be posted for courses
which might be taken by graduate students.