Problem Statement

The rationale behind the Course Managment Project

The course sites in Sakai do not take advantage of the student information system's (SIS) enterprise data to represent complex course structures. For example, there is no automated way for cross-listed courses to be associated with one course site or, alternatively, create separate course sites for multiple course sections.

This substandard connection between Sakai and the SIS has a negative impact on instructors using Sakai, the staff who support them and ultimately students.

Instructors who find an improper relationship between their course and the Sakai course site become confused and spend time trying to get Sakai to work rather than focussing on their teaching. Support staff are forced to find ways of working around the limitations in the system, often wasting time doing repeated manual tasks. When the problems are too great for instructors or support staff to overcome, the course may be limited in its effectiveness or may not not end up using Sakai, robbing the benefits the system brings to students.

Some institutions will find it impossible to deploy Sakai until these problems are solved either because these capabilities are already offered by existing systems and/or because of the increased overhead of running Sakai without improved course management capabilities.

A successful solution would provide a seamless integration of Sakai with the SIS both from a implementation and users point of view. Proper relationships between course structures and Sakai sites would be easily managed by system administrators and instructors.