Sakai 12 Straw person

An initial open discussion regarding Sakai 12 priorities was held at the Apereo 2015 Conference, 3 June 2015.  A straw man list of proposed improvements and changes surfaced during the discussion is outlined below.  Contributors are encouraged to add/edit items to the list.  However, no item below should be considered a Sakai 12 deliverable until firm development commitments are secured. This list was revised at Open Apereo 2017 with a view for release Dec. 2017.

 

Big Ideas

Set up an Apereo Working Group to think about the future of digital learning technology

• Rubrics
• Assignments refactor
• WCAG 2 Accessibility Certification
• Instructor controlled "open" vs "closed" access per site/per tool ?  - Can someone explain?
• Continue modularizing, reduce "sakai" toolset in favor of LTI tools
• xAPI improvements (LRW translates xAPI statements to Caliper, so this has become a higher priority than implementing Caliper). See Miguel Pellicer & an S2U report from 2016 on enhancements.
• Re-architect to deploy in the cloud, auto-scale in the cloud
• Intuitive easy to use interface (better, stronger,faster)
• Quicker or Slower Major releases
• Resources - updated interface, doc/image preview, persistent links (won't break when moved to different folder)
• Google Docs Integration - Check out Scriba - Google Docs
• Google Groups Integration
• Turnitin LTI from Western Ontario (has been running in prod for 1 year). 
• LTI App Store
• LTI Content Item,  CKEditor
• LTI Placements
• XWiki - - With awesome conversion - (not happening. Alternate solutions? replacement for rWiki)
• Drag and Drop on All Upoad tools
• Drag and Drop for all list of things (reordering)
• OAEDrive Integration 
• Box / S3 / Azure ....
• thing on the right side of the editor (Canvas picker aka Entity Linker)
• Commons (Noodle)
• Bullhorn (Noodle)
• configuration on the fly within Sakai (Earle) - new tool. (will allow tool descriptions to be edited)
• surface a different selection of tools based on a site properties (NYU)
• add tool config to DB
• course management configuration (Earle) (replaces sakora)
• better description of tools (in Edit Tools)
• merge edit tools and page order & merge groups and add participants (Western)
• disentangle site description from home page text (Western) 
• remove the word sakai from UI (Western and others?)
• site stats admin summarising tool usage over whole system (Matt Clare)
• improved reading lists (see below)
• put more text into Elastic Search (Earle), event data in ES
• search box in top bar (or floating search bar)
• drive distribute cache model home by removing clustered event model (no more local caches)
• tagging Service. Samigo Tag, search and reuse questions.  
• refactor elastic Search to allow multi Index
• improve search so it's easy to search within one tool
• improve what happens when you click on the results of a search
• Samigo Exceptions
• Pluggable Content Review Implementations
• Chat tool upgraded frontend and backend (jgroups)

 

Out of Scope

• Fully implement Caliper. It was considered but can not be implemented at this time
• 95% of the idea of "Dashboard" is dead. (Dashboard goes back to contrib)

New/Enhanced Capabilities

Specifications Compliance

• LTI 2.0+ grading and roster services - IMS spec not yet done
• LTI 2.1 - Likely will make Sakai 11 (deprecated by IMS)
• IMS Sensor API (Caliper Framework) - IMS Spec not done
• IMS CC 1.3 (actually in 10.1)

Proposed Deprecations/Removals 11

• OSP / Warehouse / Metaobj - Deleted for 11
• PDA Portal - Deleted for 11
• Remove all "standalone" code Gradebook - Done for 11
• Remove all "standalone" code in Samigo - Not yet done
• Remove axis web services - Done for 11
• Remove XSLT portal SAK-29179 - Done for 11
• Remove support for HSQLDB 1.8. SAK-28053 - Getting issue details... STATUS  Some tools currently aren't working with this old version and nightly is still running it, new nightly will be just Oracle and MySQL. It's possible H2 or HSQLDB 2 could be used in it's place SAK-23674 - Getting issue details... STATUS but old .sql scripts (mostly in kernel) wouldn't be useful. 
  • Leave unit tests for now, ideally upgrade these.

Proposed Deprecations/Removals 12

• Gradebook Classic deprecated (remove for 13)
• Dashboard removed (in contrib)

Uncertain status

• rWiki (stealth); uncertain status. General consensus is to keep rWiki alive through Sakai 11 but this may take some work.
  • Based on Apereo Wiki BOF there will be an investigation of possible integration of xWiki with Sakai.

Infrastructure Changes

• Transition from SVN to Git; host repos at Github (Summer 2014); single sakai "core" repo;
•  Contrib projects encouraged to migrate but not a hard requirement

Stretch goals

• Project Keitai Phase 2
• LTI resource picker button for CkEditor (csev)
• Gradebook rubrics
• Consistent gradebook linking between tools
• Grading: new front-end (NYU) - Done for 11
• Portfolio: Karuta services
• Tomcat standard deployment - no volunteer currently per Sakai core team 10/30/2014. 
• Google calendar integration (UMich) - available as a Contrib tool.
• Forums: tool simplification - NYU has interest but not a priority at the moment. 
• Integration: Google Groups and Drive - affects resources and Settings > Manage Groups (NYU) (aiming for Sakai 12)
•  rWiki: Perl conversion script to replacement wiki - This is intended as conversion scripts to move content, but we do not have a new wiki defined yet. 
• Events: refine event tracking for enhanced analytics. Nobody assigned yet.
• Embed forum topics across Sakai - Does this mean that entity picker allows you to go directly to the Forum? Do we have this already in Sakai 10 (needs to investigate).
• Students have access to their own activity in Statistics - nobody expressing much interest on Sakai core team call 10/30/2014. 
• Add support for PostgreSQL? MySQL and Oracle both owned by the same company. (Lots of great, promising MySQL forks though)  . Seems very unlikely. MariaDB seen as risk mitigation.

 Wish List

• Select multiple files / folders and download to desktop as a.zip ( SAK-25438 - Getting issue details... STATUS ) 

• Connect to cloud file storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, S3 from Resources   
• Thumbnail view of Resources that are Images - currently not planned for 11 - Steve Swinsburg 11/3/2014 .

• "Search (this site)" box at top of portal so it shows on every page  

• Improve groups management to allow people to paste in group memberships
• Exploit Entity Broker interfaces by writing plugins for CK Editor, eg, resource listing widget, embed poll in iframe widget. Might be worth revisiting per Sakai core team meeting 10/30/2014.  start from another open source picker project and add entities.
• Filter out duplicate events in the collated view of a user's calendars in My Workspace (esp. term dates)
• ( SAK-28046 - Getting issue details... STATUS ) URL as a student submission type to Assignments - ie. Submit a domain of somene's own as the assignment artifact http://something.com or a journal/blog post http://mfeldstein.com/villanova-distance-learning-task-force-attribution/
• Add calculated itemized marking rubric to Assignments' Supplement Items
• allow assignments to be set with no close and accept until date
• Favorites for sites
• help with printing iframe - place printer icon at top of iframe. Still may be an issue after iFrame removal. Printer specific CSS. investigation needed. Could be a useful feature for Sakai 11. 
• Option for watermarks in Samigo for forensics on sharing screenshot'ed questions. If resources available, sure. However not seeming to be a priority based on Sakai core team meeting 10/30/2014. 
• D3 http://d3js.org/ into Forums tool instead of SNAPP - Changed from SNAPP since Java Applets are no longer a good idea.  From Sakai core team notes 10/23/14.
• UI for how many of which tools are deployed.  Based on the queries often used for Sakai global tool surveys, but could inform app administrators, teaching centres etc. (not just DB).

• Promote reuse. More public faces. Easy import/export of all content in microformats.  Opportunity to add a OSI or CC licence to content as created