Sakai Project Overview
Hosei University IT Research Center
Tokyo
May 13, 2005
Joseph Hardin,
University of Michigan
School of Information
Sakai Board Chair
KYOU / sakai
Boundary, Situation
Challenges for Higher Education
Serving the frontiers of innovation for
users, getting faculty innovations in
teaching and research available to a
large community rapidly
Delivering sustainable economics to
university systems, lowering cost of
key infrastructure
2
Online Collaboration and Learning Environments
IUB Oncourse Growth
are Key Tools for our Faculty and Students Now
90%
80%
70%
Percentage
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Spr99
Fal99
Spr00
Fal00
Spr01
Fal01
Spr02
Fal02
Sp03
Fa03
Sem es ters
Cours es
facultyX2
Students X2
Rapid, continuing growth in adoption and use.
Just keeps growing.
3
So, The Sakai Project - 2004
“The University of Michigan, Indiana University,
MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the
Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining forces
to integrate and synchronize their considerable
educational software into a pre-integrated
collection of open source tools.” (January, 2004)
Sakai Project receives $2.4 million grant from
Mellon Foundation; support from Hewlett Foundation
4
Sakai Funding
• Each of the 4 Core Universities Commits
– 5+ developers/architects, etc. under Sakai Board
project direction for 2 years
– Public commitment to implement Sakai
– Open/Open licensing – “Community Source”
• So, overall project levels
– $4.4M in institutional staff (27 FTE)
– $2.4M Mellon, $300K Hewlett (first year)
– Additional investment through partners
5
Why: All the simple reasons
These are core infrastructures at our Universities
• Economic advantages to core schools, partners
• Higher ed values – open, sharing, building the
commons – core support for collaboration tech
• We should be good at this – teaching, research
are our core competencies
• Maintains institutional capacity, independence
• Ability to rapidly innovate – move our tools
within/among HE institutions rapidly
Based on goals of interoperability Desire to harvest research advances and
faculty innovation in teaching quickly
6
Response to
Sakai
Project in
higher
education
press.
Quick and
positive.
Sakai will be
influential.
More so as
community
grows.
7
Sakai Project Timeline (Aggressive)
July 04
Jan 04
Michigan
•CHEF Framework
•CourseTools
•WorkTools
Indiana
•Navigo Assessment
OneStart
•Oncourse
MIT
•Stellar
Stanford
•CourseWork
•Assessment
OKI
•OSIDs
uPortal
SAKAI 1.0 Release
•Tool Portability Profile
•Framework
•Services-based Portal
•Refined OSIDs
& implementations
SAKAI Tools
•Complete CLE
•Assessment
May 05
SAKAI 2.0 Release
•Tool Portability Profile
•Framework
•Services-based Portal
Dec 05
Activity:
Maintenance &
Transition from a
project to
a community
SAKAI Tools
•Complete CLE
•Assessment Tool
•Research Tools
•Authoring Tools
Activity: Ongoing implementation work at local institution…
Primary SAKAI Activity
Re-factoring “best of” features for tools
Conforming tools to Tool Portability Profile
Primary SAKAI Activity
Refining SAKAI Framework,
Tuning and conforming additional tools
Intensive community building/training
8
Sakai Project Deliverables
Working Code – CMS/CLE- Collaboration and Learning
Environment – Sakai 1.0
•
Course management system – core tools plus
•
•
•
Quizzing and assessment tools, [ePortfolio from OSPI], etc
Research collaboration system
Portal (uPortal 2.3, 3.x)
Modular tools - also pre-integrated to work out of the box
Tool Portability Profile
•
Specifications for writing portable software to achieve
application ‘code mobility’ among institutions – modular tools
and services
Synchronized development, adoptions at Michigan,
Indiana, MIT, Stanford – Sakai 1.0 is the next
generation for CourseWork, CHEF, Oncourse,
Stellar
Sakai Community – Committed and active
9
Basic Sakai Strategy
•
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Partner with like minded institutions
Build an open, world-class system
Use/develop open source products
Build framework for easy tool building
Build international community of
adopters and contributors
• Move innovation into tools quickly
10
So, What is Sakai?
• Sakai is a project – an initial grant for two years
• Sakai is an extensible framework - provides
basic capabilities to support a wide range of
tools and services – teaching and research
• Sakai is a set of tools - written and supported by
various groups and individuals
• Sakai is a product - a released bundle of the
framework and a set of tools which have been
tested and released as a unit
• Sakai is a community – an emerging group of
people and resources supporting the code and
each other, realizing large scale Open
Source efficiencies in Higher Ed
11
Supporting the Class
Sakai as Course Management System (CMS)
12
Supporting the Lab
Sakai as collaboratories - support for online research teams
13
CHEF-Based NEESGrid
Software
NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05
14
Grid
Service
Stubs
So, Sakai is plugging into
the high performance
GRID.
NMI / OGCE
Portal
Portlets
And
Teamlets
Service
API
Grid
Protocols
Grid
Services
Local
Portal
Services
Remote
Content
Services
HTTP
Remote
Content
Servers
www.ogce.org
Jetspeed
Internal
Services
Figure 4: The revised portal architecture will provide a unified interface for
portal services.
NSF National Middleware Initiative
Indiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA
15
Open Grid
Computing
Environment
Example:
Submitting
a job
to the
GRID.
Note research computing tools added on left. 16
Bringing the lab to the
classroom
17
Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan.
Some example screen shots.
18
Ctools – List of Worksites – Classes, Projects
Both students and faculty can set up projects.
In fact, we are seeing the rate of project creation surpass
that of class creation. People like to work/learn together.
19
Site/class home page
20
Site Resources area
21
Discussion tool – Forums
22
Email Archive
23
Site Info – class list
24
But, More than a CMS
• Sakai more than Course Management System
• Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment
Staff 1 Staff 2
Staff 3
Student
Student Student
Sakai
Discussion
Forum
Resource
Management
Collaborative Project
Middle East
News Feed
Discussion
Forum
Middle East Discussion
Use for teaching/learning/research and many other
online group activities for faculty, students, staff. 25
Sakai in Production at UM, IU Now
• We have about 25,000 people using CTools in at
least one course at UM. That is about ~54% of
candidate users at University of Michigan.
• There are over 1000 course sites representing
nearly 2000 sections this term.
• Our transition from the legacy system will be
complete this Fall, 2005; legacy system ‘turned
off’; then we are all Sakai/Ctools at UMichigan
Doing fine…
26
Building the Sakai Community
• Developer and Adopter Support for Universities
SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program
Community for ongoing development, adoption, support
• Commercial Support – Sakai Commercial Affiliates
Based on open-open licensing – open source, open for
commercialization
SCA – Fee-based services from vendors include…
• Installation/integration, on-going support, training
• Think of as “Sakai Red Hats”
Also, IMS Global Learning Consortium – building standards; working
with CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks,
e.g., WebCT, BlackBoard, Sun, Cisco Learning, etc.
27
Sakai Educational Partner’s Program
Developing the Community to Guide the Source.
•
•
•
Membership Fee: US$10K per year ($5K for smaller schools), 3
years
Access to SEPP staff
– Community development liaison
– SEPP developers, documentation writers
Invitation to Sakai Partners Conferences
– Developer training for the TPP, tool development
– Strategy and implementation workshops
– Software exchange for partner-developed tools
• Seat at the Table as Sakai Develops
The success of the SEPP effort will determine
the long term success of the project.
28
Sakai Educational Partners – April 1, 2004
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Arizona State University
Boston University School of Management
Brown University
Carleton College
Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of
Teaching
Carnegie Mellon University
Coastline Community College
Columbia University
Community College of Southern Nevada
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Florida Community College/Jacksonville
Foothill-De Anza Community College
Franklin University
Georgetown University
Harvard University
Hosei University IT Research Center
Johns Hopkins University
Lubeck University of Applied Sciences
Maricopa County Community College
Monash University
Nagoya University
New York University
Northeastern University
North-West University (SA)
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
Portland State University
Princeton University
Roskilde University (Denmark)
Rutgers University
Simon Fraser University
State University of New York
•
Stockholm University
•
SURF/University of Amsterdam
•
Tufts University
•
Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain)
•
Universitat de Lleida (Spain)
•
University of Arizona
•
University of California Berkeley
•
University of California, Davis
•
University of California, Los Angeles
•
University of California, Merced
•
University of California, Santa Barbara
•
University of Cambridge, CARET
•
University of Cape Town, SA
•
University of Colorado at Boulder
•
University of Delaware
•
University of Hawaii
•
University of Hull
•
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•
University of Minnesota
•
University of Missouri
•
University of Nebraska
•
University of Oklahoma
•
University of Texas at Austin
•
University of Virginia
•
University of Washington
•
University of Wisconsin, Madison
•
Virginia Polytechnic Institute/University
•
Whitman College
•
Yale University
New
•
University of Melbourne, Australia
•
University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design
29
Institute
Known Pilots and Production
• Boston University School of
Management
• Carleton College
• Foothill-De Anza Community
College District
• Indiana University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Lübeck University of Applied
Sciences, Germany
• Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
• Northwestern University
• Rutgers
• Stanford University
• University of California,
Berkeley
• University of California,
Merced
• University of Cape Town, SA
• University Fernando Pessoa,
Portugal
• University of Lleida, Spain
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of Virginia
• Whitman College
• Yale University
Growing pretty quickly.
Some Sakai Partner Projects:
Examples of Early Community
Contributions to the Sakai Project
31
The Berkeley Grade Book
University of California, Berkeley funded
development of an on-line grade book.
The UC Berkeley grade book is now in pilot
on the Berkeley campus as a stand alone
tool, and moving into pilot at IU.
It is part of the 1.5 release.
32
Grad Tools
The University of Michigan’s Grad Tools provides
doctoral students and faculty a way of tracking
degree progress from the point of choosing an
advisor to degree conferral.
Doctoral students create their own site, which
contains an automatically personalized
dissertation checklist based on data from their
department and from the graduate school.
Students control access to their Grad Tools site,
and use collaboration features common to
CTools, including file storage, group email, email
notification, structured discussion, and more.
33
Keeping track of
student progress
toward a degree.
More time for learning,
and teaching.
34
Samigo – Testing and Assessment
Part of 1.5 release
35
Melete – Online Lesson Authoring
Tool – Part of ETUDES Project
Foothill College’s Melete, an online lesson authoring
environment, is the classroom component of ETUDES
(Easy to Use Distance Education Software) that is being
rewritten in Java for Sakai-based ETUDES-NG. Melete
offers instructors the ability to author online learning
modules. Melete features extra controls to assist online
teachers/learners, such as the ability to set prerequisites
and the pacing of material.
The Hewlett Foundation funded deployment of Sakai for the
service provided to 48 California community colleges.
Part of 2.0 release
36
ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production
300 faculty from 17 community colleges
(highlighted in red on next slide) from the
ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of
ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in
the spring and summer of 2005.
Three colleges will go into production in the fall.
More to follow in the spring.
All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.
37
Skins at Course Site Level
38
Melete – Lesson Builder
39
Composing content online
using a WYSIWYG Editor
Linking to websites to supplement
or support the content of a lesson
This is MELETE
Uploading all types of
documents for lesson
components/content
40
Accessibility
metadata
Will plug in to TILE
from U Toronto.
Ability to check for lack of
compliance with Section 508
accessibility guidelines
41
Student View – Navigation & Licensing
content
Navigation
is created
automatically
Authors can license their content
42
Open Source Portfolio Initiative
(OSPI)
OSPI is a community of individuals and organizations
collaborating on the development of the leading open
source electronic portfolio software.
The Open Source Portfolio software is individual-centered,
enabling users to gather work products and other
artifacts to be stored and shared with others, and used
for personal growth and development. The ePortfolio
toolset is being developed on the Sakai infrastructure
providing a stand alone application as well as an
integration of rich portfolio tools in the full suite of Sakai
applications.
See www.theospi.org
Tracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0
43
All these are examples of distributed development
of innovation – Sakai Partners building new tools,
and sharing them immediately with the community,
through the Sakai platform.
44
Building Contribution Community
• Receiving code fixes and folding them in
• Receiving large tools and working to integrate
them effectively
–
–
–
–
–
XWiki
Blog
Jabber Instant Messaging
SCORM player
RDF-based visual concept mapper
Rapidly growing area. Possible because we’re
open source. Thus anyone can contribute.
Necessary to achieve goal of rapid innovation
within mature system. We filter contributions.
45
SCA – Sakai Commercial Affiliates
First Generation – Open Source Software Support
Support for the Sakai
codebase, or support of
Sakai users = SCA Member
46
‘Second
Generation’
SCA Partners
47
…sees two significant areas of activity and investment on the part of institutions
and higher education communities (…) with the Sakai Project having the
promise of playing a keystone role in both of these areas:
• Open-source Business and Learning Solutions: Institutions are driving
towards collaborative, open systems for content creation, management and
delivery, as well as administrative and support systems. The institutions see open
systems as a way to reduce operating costs and a growing dependency on
proprietary software vendors, and as a way to unleash the innovation and
creativity of their faculty and students.
• Interoperable Learning Content: Institutions are driving towards
interoperable learning materials (textbooks, tests, supplemental materials).
Institutions increasingly are differentiating themselves in their effort to attract
students through specialization (…) A key need, therefore, is for content to be
standards based and interoperable in order to simplify its acquisition. A related and
critical need is the effective ability to find learning materials across a vast array of
electronic sources.
IBM believes that Sakai is one of the answers…
48
What IBM plans to do with Sakai Project…
Reference Architecture: Working with a group of higher education leaders and
partners, IBM intends to publish a reference architecture for the higher education
industry and to create an integration stack (…)
SW Stack and Offering: With the Sakai application as the core, IBM plans to build
an end-to-end software stack(…)
HW Stack and Offering: Building on the software stack, the next logical step is to
build a combined software/hardware stack and provide clients with what we are
calling a “Sakai-in-a-Box” offering that enables them to order a Sakai installed
server that they simply plug in and configure to their specific institution’s needs. This
will be a significant factor in enabling a fast adoption rate for Sakai.
Hosting Stack and Offering: Examining the successful business models of
commercially successfully Course Management Systems highlights the fact that
being able to provide a web-accessible ‘hosted’ offering is a key factor in fast
commercial adoption(…)
49
What IBM plans to do… 2
Code Donations: IBM is well known for our significant contributions of source
code to the open source community, and we are open to considering the
donation of IBM owned assets to the Sakai community.
“Commercial” SW expertise: As one of the world’s largest software
companies,IBM Software Group can offer the Sakai Project significant
experience across the full spectrum of code development, packaging, testing
and commercialization.
Global Sales and Marketing Channel: IBM manages the single largest
Education Industry channel in the world, combining the most experienced
team of IBM Education Industry sales experts in the world with the most
extensive Business Partner channel in the world. With the key to Sakai’s
success being quick, broad commercial adoption, having an experienced,
global channel will be a significant contributor.
Both universities and commercial partners
contributing code and expertise. Benefit of
open source strategy.
50
And, interestingly…
• Sun
• Apple
• Unisys
?
Are also asking about
joining the Sakai
Commercial Affiliates, and
proposing to do similar
things with the Sakai
Community
Validation of Open Source Model…
Useful partners in open source community.
51
Open Source Dynamics
• Open Source Projects are crucial to
supporting innovation in higher ed
• We have some examples now of ‘for
higher ed, by higher ed’ OS efforts
• A literature is developing around the
dynamics of open source communities
• We learn from experience and add to
our common stock of knowledge; we are
learning institutions, after all.
The Sakai Project is a pioneer in this, devising its
own open source strategy: Community Source.52
‘Community Source’ Projects
Community source is based on many of the
principles of open source development efforts.
But community source efforts rely more
explicitly on defined roles, and funded
commitments by community members than some
open source development models.
“Open Source for Higher Ed Institutions”
53
Part of Much larger Whole
• Multiplying Open/Community Source
Efforts
• integration, standards…innovation
• Figuring out how to work together
• Development, operations, maintenance, timing,
evolution, building open source community in HE
Chandler/Westwood
PKI
Dartmouth
Twin Peaks
Navigator
54
55
Summer Conference 2005
Part of Community Source
Week
Conference Co-Chairs
SEPP Partners – Yale
and Cambridge
Technical Description of 2.03.0 Dev & Contrib
Processes
Governance Discussion
Underway Now
Baltimore, MD, USA
June 8-10 (soon)
56
(Aside) What’s in a Name?
A little history – the Sakai Project had the Chef
Project as one of its precursors.
Chef = CompreHensive collaborativE Framework
We named it that way for fun – we liked the
Japanese ‘Iron Chef’ TV show.
SAKAI at one time meant: Synchronized
Architecture for Knowledge Acquisition
Infrastructure – too big a mouthful!
Now it is just ‘Sakai’ without all capital letters. It is
just a nice word. We like the sound.
57
But, it is also…
The name of a famous Iron
Chef. (More fun!)
It is also (we think):
Which has connotations,
we are told, of moving
across boundaries, of being
involved in a complex
situation. (Right?)
Appropriate for us.
58
Thank You
Questions, Discussion
59
Challenge: Innovation Frontiers
Textbook Integration
w/ Publishers
Special Character Sets
Math/Languages/Sciences
Sophisticated Assessment
Integration/Leverage
w/Enterprise Services
Research/Committee
Support
Streaming Multi-media
Current CMS
Ongoing Maintenance
Self-paced
Tutorials
Workflow
Library Integration
E-Portfolio
Direct Manipulation
User Interfaces
IMS/SCORM
Greater Personalization
How will Higher Ed meet these growing requirements for CLE
functionality in a period of relatively flat resources?
60
Sakai 1.0 Tools
Admin: Alias Editor (chef.aliases)
Admin: Archive Tool (chef.archive)
Admin: Memory / Cache Tool
(chef.memory)
Admin: On-Line (chef.presence)
Admin: Realms Editor (chef.realms)
Admin: Sites Editor (chef.sites)
Admin: User Editor (chef.users)
Announcements (chef.announcements)
Assignments (chef.assignment)
C. R. U. D. (sakai.crud)
Chat Room (chef.chat)
Discussion (chef.discussion)
Discussion (chef.threadeddiscussion)
Dissertation Checklist (chef.dissertation)
Dissertation Upload
(chef.dissertation.upload)
Drop Box (chef.dropbox)
Email Archive (chef.mailbox)
Help (chef.contactSupport)
Membership (chef.membership)
Message Of The Day (chef.motd)
My Profile Editor (chef.singleuser)
News (chef.news)
Preferences (chef.noti.prefs)
Recent Announcements
(chef.synoptic.announcement)
Recent Chat Messages (chef.synoptic.chat)
Recent Discussion Items
(chef.synoptic.discussion)
Resources (chef.resources)
Sample (sakai.module)
Schedule (chef.schedule)
Site Browser (chef.sitebrowser)
Site Info (chef.siteinfo)
Web Content (chef.iframe)
Worksite Setup (chef.sitesetup)
WebDAV
61
Sakai 1.5 Tools
• Samigo - QTI compliant assessment
engine (Stanford)
• Syllabus Tool (Indiana)
• Context Sensitive Help (Indiana)
• Presentation Tool (SEPP)
• Portfolio Tool - OSPI (R-Smart) (separate
release)
62
Sakai 2.0 (New Tools)
• Completely re-written Kernel (UM / MIT)
• Melete - Online classroom - lesson editor
(Foothill)
• Grade Book (UC Berkeley / MIT )
63
Tools from Partners
•
•
•
•
•
•
FlowTalk (Cambridge)
BlackBoard Import (U Texas)
Xwiki (Cambridge)
Mail / Messaging (Northwestern / Yale)
WebDav Features (Rutgers)
Many bug fixes…
64
ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots
College of the Siskiyous
Members Outside CA
•Stephen F. Austin State
University, TX
•Harcum College, PA
Mendocino College
Santa Rosa Junior College
Lake Tahoe Community College
Vista College
Chabot College
Laney College
Skyline College
College of Alameda
Foothill College
Merritt College
San Joaquin Delta College
De Anza College
West Valley College
Porterville College
Gavilan College
Bakersfield College
West Los Angeles College
Taft College
Los Angeles South West
Antelope Valley College
Cerro Coso Community College
Los Angeles ITV
El Camino College
Crafton Hills College
Los Angeles City College
Glendale College
San Bernardino Community College
Los Angeles Harbor College
Long
Beach
CC
Los Angeles Pierce College
Coastline Community College
Los Angeles Mission College
Imperial Valley College
Los Angeles Trade Tech
Mira Costa College
Los Angeles Valley College
East Los Angeles College
* 300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to
a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005. Three colleges65
will
go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.
College Brand Skins at Portal Level
66
The Twin Peaks Project
Sun Microsystems, Inc. funded deployment of a
citation/link authoring tool by Indiana University.
The Twin Peaks project is an experiment in
providing a search and one-click selection of
library electronic resources from within the Sakai
authoring tool. The interim tool demonstrated at
the December 2005 SEPP Conference provided
searching of EBSCO Academic Premier, ERIC,
or the IU Libaries SFX enhanced online
catalog's electronic holdings.
67
Library search as part
of WYSIWYG Editor
68
Accessing library collections from within Sakai
69
Search results automatically pasted into text.
70
The Sakai Community
• Main site: www.sakaiproject.org – outward looking
• Bugs: bugs.sakaiproject.org – open, active
• Sakai-wide collaboration area
– collab.sakaiproject.org; sakai work sites, discussion
lists, resources areas; working instance of Sakai
– sakai-dev@sakaiproject.org – open mail list, active
– sakai-user@sakaiproject.org – open mail list, active
• Sakai Educational Partners (SEPP)
– Separate mailing lists, discussion areas; for internal use
– Dedicated staff – technical and admin support
– Two conferences per year; regular VTCs, phone calls
Plus, the growing resources from industry
71