Note that this document describes the S3.0 deliverables and will be regularly updated based on the staff and financial resources committed by the community, and in phase with the S3 project plan (that describes the strategies to achieve these deliverables)

More information is available on the managed Sakai 3 project to deliver Sakai 3.0 by the end of June 2011.

Introduction

This document presents a draft roadmap for the Sakai 3 project between June 2010 and end of June 2011.  The roadmap presents the high level deliverable for the development project including when areas of functionality will be delivered and by when. 

There will be three community pre-releases: end September 2010; end December 2010; and end March 2011. 

The project plan that has yet to be developed describes the strategies to achieve these deliverables according to the timing expressed in the roadmap.  This roadmap is also based on the proposed team size listed in the MOU that will work under the direction of a shared project manager to execute the project plan to complete this roadmap.

The roadmap was planned using the following guidelines:

• Functionality should be beta quality by the end of each development  cycle, meaning that it should be finished enough to use but that we should also expect feedback from beta users that lead to further changes.
• Plumbing and invasive changes come first in the roadmap as much as possible.
• Services that other features need or that should influence other work also come early in the plan. 
• High priority work is generally earlier than lower priority, except if some of the above principles come into play. 
• Integrations, fringe or isolated functionality, and low priority items are toward the end of the roadmap.  These items may be pushed into a later development cycle depending on how well the project tracks to schedule.
• User feedback, research, and evolving requirements from later cycles also have the potential to bring major changes to designs and functionality developed in earlier iterations.
  

Core concepts of the Sakai 3 project are:

1. Flexible but controllable workspaces. Tools and resources are exposed on pages through placement of tool widgets leading to almost infinite flexibility, especially when 3^rd party widgets are included. Page composition can be tied down to a single author working within a predetermined template or opened up to multiple contributors working in a wiki-like way.
2. People, networking, and groups. The people in the organization can tell the world (or each other) about themselves, can find others with related interests or readily form workgroups for various activities. A member of the community can build up a contact list and have preferential sharing and communications with contacts.
3. Resource discovery and use. Sakai will act as a resource discovery platform, describing in a common way both uploaded files and resources from many other sources. Sakai will also allow flexible management of those resources, from small, private collections to large, shared collections or libraries.
4. Communication and sharing. Content can be one to one or one to many without requiring a common membership in a single workspace, and users should have personalized or filtered experiences that cut across spaces and activities. Collaboration should be seamless and not hindered across tools and users.
5. Openness and Permeability - although it may be configured otherwise, there should be a navigable public (anonymous) experience of Sakai for all public content, including the support of Open Teaching activities. Sakai should also allow external resources and functionality to be accessed within the context of Sakai activities, and its resources and functionality should also be available to external systems where appropriate (configured according to institutional policy).
6. Technological Improvement (Increased scalability; ease of use for software developers)

Building on these core concepts, and mixing in concepts such as 'all entities can be commented upon, tracked or assessed' (i.e. everything is content) and 'all activities can be connected together in workflows' (i.e. Customizable Workflows), we aim to support the following teaching and learning concepts:

See the Sakai Learning Capabilities v 1.0 at this link for more information

Key technology initiatives for Sakai3 include:

1. Sakai will exploit the concept of restful data apis to the full in order to support unanticipated mashups of information, ease of development for new UI functionality, and familiar technologies for design oriented developers.
2. A published widget SDK which will ultimately aim to support lightweight component development by those not intimately acquainted with Sakai development, including instructors and students. 
3. Sakai will use industry-tested and supported back-end platforms that implement open standards, such as Sling (Jackrabbit JCR and Felix OSGi) and ActiveMQ (JMS) in order to provide a robust, scalable and maintainable core.
   

Q1: July to September 2010 - Academic Networking and Collaboration

The first development cycle is intended to provide the basic collaboration and content capabilities that will form the bedrock of Sakai 3. It will support general collaboration use cases that can be useful in a wide range of academic activities but will not include teaching-specific capabilities.  At the end of this stage it should be possible to deploy a functioning system that supports basic people and group management, basic resource management, basic site management and basic person to person contact management and communication. It should also be possible to demonstrate the effectiveness of the hybrid approach to transition. A significant amount of time will be spent at the beginning of this stage to secure funding and recruit resources, and to set up the development process including the new design process under discussion.

1.1 Basic user provisioning from external sources:
The milestone will provide the underlying capabilities to support user provisioning updates pushed from the institution's directory server to Sakai using near-real-time events. The ability for Sakai to look up users and groups (pull) on demand will be completed as needed in a later milestone. Support for any particular push- or pull-based standards or protocols (e.g., via IMS Learning Information Services, or LDAP integration) in this milestone will be driven by the needs of early adopting schools.

1.2 Basic self-service group space creation:
Users will be able to create collaborative group spaces and grant users permission to access them. For this milestone, group roles will be limited to "manager" and "member."

1.3 Basic user profile information management:
Users will be able to create personal profiles, add information to their profiles from external identity sources such as LDAP directories (but not edit that externally sourced information), and have some basic control over viewing permissions for their profile information.

1.4 Basic contact management:
Users will be able to request a contact relationship with another user (similar to "friending,"), accept or reject contact requests from other users, and manage their contact lists.

1.5 Basic page management for group spaces:
Users with appropriate permissions will be able to create and edit pages, add widgets to them, apply style templates, edit navigation menus, and set edit/view permissions for pages within group spaces. Discussion and resource widgets will be among those available to add to pages for this milestone.

1.6 Basic page management for personal pages:
This functionality will be similar to that outlined in requirement 1.5 above, but will be for users' personal work spaces.

1.7 Basic content management:
Users will be able to create content resources, add and edit content descriptions and other metadata, discover content through a search interface, and add content to a personal or group page. This will include adding video resources from external servers as well as supporting personal content storage on a WebDAV-compliant server such as Xythos.

1.8 Standards-based external tool integration:
Using the BasicLTI specification, proofs-of-concept will be built to demonstrate placing at least one Sakai 2 tool and at least one third-party tool in a Sakai 3 group space. Proofs-of-concept exist for both use cases have been created prior to the start of the milestone and may be refined further in the time frame.

1.9 Basic testing of four Sakai 2/Sakai 3 hybrid use cases:
Hybrid modes include integrating an entire Sakai 2 site into a Sakai 3 portal, integrating a set of Sakai 2 tools within a Sakai 3 site template, integrating Sakai 2 tools on separate pages in a Sakai 3 site, and mixing Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 tools within a single page of a Sakai 3 page. Proofs-of-concept for all four use cases were completed prior to the start of the milestone; further work during the time period will be based on refinement the use cases.

1.10 Foundational global Sakai 3 capabilities:
A number of global capabilities will be created for the first release. Many of these are content-related, including searching, tagging, sharing, RSS syndication, etc., but also include miscellaneous global considerations such as page permissions and accessibility.

Q2: October to December 2010 - Extending the Collaboration and Learning Experience

The second development cycle will provide the foundation for more tailored, academic-specific activities and workflows such as homework submission. It will be suitable for web-enhancing classes but not for classes that require more advanced teaching-specific capabilities such as online testing. The cycle will also include further development of Sakai 2/Sakai 3 hybrid mode as well as initial work on accessibility and internationalization.  At the end of this stage, it should be possible to pilot the simple learning environment. Requirements may need to be tuned if other institutions plan to go ahead with deployment of the SLE in early 2011.

2.1 Concept and design work on learning design structures (including sequencing and workflow) and IMS CC import

2.2 Implementation of navigable experience for anonymous browsing and searching of public Sakai content, and RSS feeds for public content

2.3 Widget SDK alpha release

2.4 Basic homework submission assignments widgets with simple workflows, and design work on full assignments support

2.5 Implementation of first set of widgets including Blog/lab book/journal and polling (others TBD)

2.6 Demonstration of Accessibility and Internationalization support including the ability to customize the lexicon of the software

2.7 More advanced group and resource management use cases (including Grouper evaluation/demo and IMS Learning Information Services support), hierarchical groups and also included automatic group membership based on information in the user profile.

2.8 Completion of templating and styling support for custom skinning of specific installations

2.9 Integrated rules engine and workflow engine, with significant up front research to figure out the right approach to solve these problems

2.10 Complete hybrid mode that includes items such as sharing data between Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 tools, deep linking Sakai 2 tool items on a Sakai 3 page, and searching and getting results from across both Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 (complete definition TBD).

Q3: January to March 2011 - Managing Collaboration and Learning

the third development cycle will layer on basic group coordination, learning management, and system administration capabilities.  It should be suitable for use in some blended or fully online courses as well as research and administration collaboration that require more coordination among members. It should also be possible for adopters to run Sakai 3 as the primary LMS interface of a Sakai 2/Sakai 3 hybrid installation. Capabilities will include calendar and event integration, goals and rubrics and rich structured pages for scaffolded authoring (such as syllabus creation or portfolio development). Administration capabilities, including prototyping of multitenancy, will also be featured in this release. Finally, early developer-oriented documentation and contribution policies will be developed.  At the end of this stage we should have the outline of a credible Sakai 3 offering, albeit with heavy reliance on hybrid operation. During this stage we would also develop policies around the testing and acceptance of widgets developed outside the directed project work using the widget SDK.

3.1 Calendar and Event integration.

3.2 Complete assignment work with more varied workflows, including group projects, peer review, and the setting of portfolio-like goals and rubrics

3.3 Basic performant test and quizzes (and survey) framework

3.4 Add structured pages that allow a more free form assembly of dashboard widgets in containers with flexible templated permissions to cover portfolio and OpenSyllabus use-cases.

3.5 Implementation and refinement of tracking and grading (including reporting)

3.6 Office hours/tutorials/sign-up widget(s)

3.7 Help and end-user documentation

3.8 Open Social integration

3.9 Multi-tenancy demonstration and admin pages/tools.

3.10 Content management functionality to provide better organization and access to content, hierarchical organization, version control, RSS support and integration with other repositories

3.11 Wiki-like creation and editing of content

3.12 Synchronous learning using existing technologies and sites that support video, chat and IM

3.13 Widget SDK beta, with feedback from pilot developers

Q4: March to June 2011 - Integration and Enhanced Collaboration

The fourth development cycle will focus on integration (especially standards-based integration) and making Sakai 3 more approachable for developers outside of the core team. It should be suitable as a full LMS replacement for some institutions, depending on their needs and priorities. Highlights include support for integration standards such as LTI and Common Cartridge, richer templates and workflows for teaching-specific functionality such as assessment and learning activity sequencing, enhanced social networking, and mobile capabilities. Here areas of work are less specific due to higher uncertainty on progress in the previous cycles.  Depending on successful delivery of the requirements for stages 1-3 and involvement of additional resources, significant progress towards more widgets to replace Sakai 2 tools and incorporate them into the tracking, grading, commenting infrastructure should be possible.

4.1  Assessment/ developments

4.2  Learning Activity developments

4.3  Online learning space design developments

4.4  Library integration developments

4.5  Export/Import development

4.6  Mobile Sakai developments

4.7  Full LTI support and Common Cartridge support

4.8  Social networking functionality to enable better connections between users based on interests, profiles, etc

4.9 iTunes related integration to support items such as PODcasting and VODcasting

4.10 Usages statistics to provide feedback on which areas of the product are used by a given institution

4.11 SSO integration, with significant research upfront to determine the best solutions to support

4.12 Math ML support

4.13 Widget SDK final.

The following features were considered for the release and it was decided that they will be addressed in future development cycles:

-       Drawing tools

-       Instructor and course evaluations

-       Question pools

-       Image management functionality

-       Multi-media authoring

-       Slideshows

-       Offline mode