http://www.sakaiproject.org/press/sakai-rc1.html
You’ve probably seen this news announced already in a number of places; as promised Sakai Release Candidate 1 was released today. This post is more a query if anyone has got a build up and running that I can have a look at. Pressed for time right now myself, but maybe I’ll get one going in the next few weeks if no one else steps forward. It looks slightly involved, though not too bad. – SWL
heya, scott. I just did a test install of Sakai on our new APOLLO server. Didn’t take as long as I guessed, but I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to _do_… It’s just a blank template page. I’ll dig through the docs and see if there is some demo content to come with it.
http://apollo.ucalgary.ca:9006/sakai-embedded/portal
There’s also a demo at http://demo.sakaiproject.org/. But, like D’Arcy, I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to actually do.
Serious usability issuess with that site (http://demo.sakaiproject.org/) on MSIE/XP. For instance, clicking the little plus sign above “welcome” got me to a screen with only the welcome message on it, and no apparent way back.
While Sakai does help get upper management to recognize the value of OSS to education, I can’t help but cringe at the money being tossed around to build an OSS comparable with aTutor and Moodle.
Seems like Sakai is very expensively re-inventing the wheel.
Michael, thanks for your comment. I have yet to be able to access a working demo of Sakai – the demo url they provide doesn’t work for me (I can log into chef, but Sakai complains it doesn’t like my login info) and the one my colleague at U of C tried to get working doesn’t work at all. I actually talked to the Sakai folks about this while I was at the Alt-I-Lab last week and they seemed pretty nonchalant about it. Oh well.
I hear what you are saying in regards to the money being spent on this project, but resist a little bit that what they are trying to build is comperable to Moodle or ATutor. Don’t get me wrong, I like both of them, but neither fit my definition of an “enterprise level” course management system. Lots of good arguments can be made that the so-called “enterprise level” CMSes aren’t actually that enterprise-ready, and that they provide a massive amount of feature bloat at an expensive price tag. But the fact remains in my mind that there are whole hosts of things that Moodle and ATutor don’t do that larger systems (and Sakai, for better or worse, aims to be one of them) enable institutions to do.
“there are whole hosts of things that Moodle and ATutor don’t do that larger systems (and Sakai, for better or worse, aims to be one of them) enable institutions to do”
Like what?
Typically I would point to
- SIS integration (not just shipping CSV files, but automatic enrollments in CMS based on student registrations, automatically setting up course shells based on SIS entries, shipping grades back to SIS)
- lack of ‘course management’ tools (end of term roll over, cloning, templates)
- formative assessment capabilities of both moodle and atutor are weak compared to some of the larger systems
- gradebook systems, student tracking capabilities are weak in Moodle, Atutor
- lack of support for synchronous collaboration (though to its credit both moodle and Atutor now at least have a chat piece)
- wireless, wap support, synch with CD ROMS
Moodle and Atutor are continually improving and adding functionality. From an teacher’s perspective they are probably looking more and more like viable tools, but if you are looking at them from the perspective of having to support *thousands* of of courses, which many institutions here have to deal with, you fairly shudder to think of some of the ‘administrative’ niceties that are not there yet.
open source
Sakai Release Candidate 1 released today (anyone got a demo running yet?) .