PILOTING SAKAI IN A MASTER
COURSE: DOES IT REALLY WORK?
Dr. Allard Strijker
University of Twente, The Netherlands
SAKAI CONFERENCE, ATLANTA 5-8 DECEMBER 2006
Overview of the presentation
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Personal Background
Organization
Pilot
Expectations
Master program
Course setup
Conclusions
Personal Background
• Educational designer / Teacher
• Started in 1997 developer Teletop
Course Management System
• From 2000 focus on research:
– Standards for educational technology
– Reuse of learning material
– Interoperability
University of Twente Campus
Profile of the university
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Founded in 1961
Research University
Entrepreneurial Research University
First (and only) Dutch campus university
Focus on technological developments
and their management in the knowledge
society
Education
• 5 Faculties
• 23 Bachelor programmes
• 31 Master programmes
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Bachelor & Master students: 7357
PhD’s: 703
International students: 344
International PhD’s: 285
Personnel in numbers
1600
1511
1477
1400
1424
1405
1319
1337
1324
1281
1200
1241
Scientific
Personnel
1218
NonScientific
Personnel
1000
800
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
Campus Facilities
• High speed network (UT)
– Wifi on whole campus (largest hotspot in Europe;
> 650 AP’s on site + 14 AP’s in Enschede City)
• Labs
– High pressure
– Virtual Reality
– Cleanroom
• Multifunctional
Education facilities
• Etc.
History – Choice for a CMS
Blackboard, eCollege, Moodle, N@tschool
Teletop Course Environment
What was going on? (1)
• 1997: Initial development of TeleTOP in
Department of Educational Technology
• 2000-now: large-scale use of TeleTOP in all
departments
– Incl. new, richer releases
– 2003: commercial spin-off: TeleTOP BV
• 2003: first student portal (developed by
students!)
A little bit of history (2)
• 2004: lots of activities
– open standards (IMS) are emerging, as well as
the SCORM; we deliver a discussion paper
– we move more and more to J2EE for webapps
– students complaints grow and grow (lack of
integration, information is out-of-date, inreliable
and sometimes not findable)
– UT Policy = Campus Blend: all programmes will
have f2f and online components (in different
mixes)
Pilot - Reasons
• With start of Teletop a evaluation period of 4
years was set.
• Conclusion of evaluation report made clear a
desire for
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a services oriented approach
the use of portals
the use of open standards
tailored environment
New educational approaches
Pilot in Master program
• Master track Telematics Applications
Education and Training (TAET).
• Twelve students
• Ten weeks runtime
• Study load of 140 Hours / 5 ECTS
(European Credit Transfer System)
Expectations
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The best of 10 year CMS experience
High standard of ease of use, web 20
Educational support
Mobile access
Complete integration of educational standards
Interoperability
– Import
– Export
• Efficient
• Effective
• Reuse possibilities
Initial Course Setup
• Collaborative work on Wiki
• Based on TAET Competences and
course topics
• Problem – Not experienced enough in
use of Wiki.
• I was unable to track all individual
contributions to grade
Final Course Setup
• Scientific report as result
• 4 assignments
• Teacher feedback after first two
assignments
• Peer review after third assignment
• Presentation in last lecture
SAKAI Environment
• Project site
• Blend of
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Classroom sessions
Lectures
Workshops
Student presentations
Resources
• publishing course materials
– articles
– assignments and managing the meetings and doing the
assignments
Sakai Course environment
Problems
• Inconsistency in buttons, views, functions
• A lot of clicking
• Relation Assignments, Announcements,
Schedule was not clear
• Menu behavior was problematic
• Students could not always use drop box
– Alternative use of email, feedback problems
• Students could not find resources
Schedule overview
Schedule event edit
Schedule II
Sakai - Resources
Assignments overview
Sakai - Assignments
Sakai - Assignments
Sakai - Dropbox
Unaddressed Expectations
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No real collaboration possibilities
No educational support
No mobile support
No interoperability possibilities
– Import
– Export
• No export possibilities based
• Yet 
Conclusion
• The basic functionalities work
– But in my opinion not for a large audiences
• Disappointed
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Inconsistency
Interface problems
Menu behavior
Unclear relations between functions such as
schedule, announcements, assignments,
resources
– Technical issues, access students drop box
– Inefficient, A lot of clicking
Solutions
• Handbook for interface use
– Functions
– Views
– Button names
• Good examples
– Mac OS
– Windows
Thank you!
• Questions?
• Contact:
– Dr. Allard Strijker
– A.strijker@utwente.nl
– http://users.gw.utwente.nl/strijker