Sakai Project Overview
TERENA
(Trans-European Research and Education
Networking Association)
Poznan, Poland
June 6, 2005
Joseph Hardin,
University of Michigan
School of Information
Sakai Board Chair
KYOU / sakai
Boundary, Situation
Building Open Source Educational
and Research Infrastructure
• Course Management Systems are now a
central part of a university’s services
• Remote research collaboration tools are
becoming essential for participation in
national and international projects - for
faculty of all schools
The Sakai Project provides both in what
we call a Collaboration and Learning
Environment (CLE)
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Online Collaboration and Learning Environments
are Key Tools for all our Faculty, Staff, Students
now. Everyone uses them.
100%
Students
Faculty
Courses
We’re experiencing rapid, continuing growth in
adoption and use. Just keeps growing.
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Challenges for Higher Education
Online Learning & Research
We must push the frontiers of innovation
for users, getting faculty innovations in
teaching and research available to a
large community rapidly; in addition to
providing basic, reliable services
We must deliver sustainable economics
to large university systems, lowering
the cost of key infrastructure as much
as possible, while delivering innovation
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Supporting the Class
Sakai as Course Management System (CMS)
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Supporting the Lab
Sakai as collaboratories - support for online research teams
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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
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Initial 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
Heavy commitment from founding schools
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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
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Sakai Project Timeline (Aggressive)
Jan 04
Michigan
•CHEF Framework
•CourseTools
•WorkTools
Indiana
•Navigo Assessment
OneStart
•Oncourse
MIT
•Stellar
July 04
SAKAI 1.0 Release
•Tool Portability Profile
•Framework
•Services-based Portal
•Refined OSIDs
& implementations
May 05
SAKAI 2.0 Release
•Tool Portability Profile
•Framework
•Services-based Portal
SAKAI Tools
•Complete CLE
•Assessment Tool
•Research Tools
•Authoring Tools
Stanford
•CourseWork
•Assessment
SAKAI Tools
•Complete CLE
•Assessment
OKI
•OSIDs
Activity: Ongoing implementation work at local
institutions…
uPortal
Primary SAKAI Activity
Designing, Building, Refining SAKAI Framework,
Tuning and conforming additional tools
Intensive community building/training
Dec 05
Activity:
Maintenance &
Transition from a
project to
a community
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Sakai Project Deliverables
Working Code – CMS/CLE- Collaboration and Learning
Environment – Sakai 1.0 – Modular Tools + Framework
• Course management system – core tools plus
• Quizzing and assessment tools, [OSPI], etc
• Research collaboration support
• Portal (uPortal 2.3, 3.x)
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 next
generation CourseWork, CHEF, Oncourse, Stellar
Sakai Community – Committed and active
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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
Build the Open Source Community
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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
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Sakai Technical Goals
Provide environment
• to write tools and services which seamlessly move from
one Sakai deployment to another – tool portability
• where the addition of a new tool does not de-stabilize the
existing tools – modularization
• to allow tools to exist both within Sakai and stand-alone
(I.e. easy porting of external tools into Sakai without
requiring rewrite – well, minimal rewrite)
• and capabilities so that Sakai services and tools can be
accessed using web services.
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Sakai Foundational Documents
• Sakai Style Guide - Describes in detail how
Sakai tools are to look and operate regardless of
implementation technology
• Sakai Java Framework - Describes the Sakai
Application Framework (SAF) as implemented in
Java
• Sakai Tool Portability Profile - Describes how
to write tools and services to be portable across
Sakai systems (in progress)
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Service Oriented Architecture
• Decompose tool code into presentation elements
and service elements
• Provides an abstraction (API) which shields the
tool code from the implementation details of the
service code.
• Allows separate development of tools & services.
• Allows effective unit testing of services
• Allows an implementation to be replaced
transparently with another implementation as long
as the API contract is fully met – e.g., choice of
many ‘Discussion Tools’ for users
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Sakai Application Framework
• SAF - Kernel - An augmented web application
which enables the Sakai APIs to be called from
the web application - this is a rich but not
constraining environment
• SAF - Common Services - A set of common
services available to all tools (authentication,
authorization, hierarchy, repository, others)
• SAF - Presentation Services - A set of Sakai
specific JSF tags to handle presentation details
and provide widgets such as a date-picker or
WSYWIG editor.
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Sakai Integration and
Development Choices
• Develop a TPP Compliant Tool
Assured to be portable across Sakai environments
• Integrate a web application
– Responsible for own presentation and
compliance to style guide (may use Sakai JSF
tags if JSF is used)
– Can operate both stand-alone and within Sakai
• Integrate via web-services
• Capability being developed
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But, More than a CMS
Sakai is more than Course Management System.
Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment
Meant to support the full spectrum of scholarly
activities, and leverage adoption across them
• Support for teaching/learning
• Support for online research communities, faculty,
research staff, and students
• Support for Staff – eg, project work, surveys, etc
All of this made easier by the ability of any
user to set up a group workspace.
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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…
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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.
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Sakai Educational Partner’s Program
Developing the Community to Guide the Source.
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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.
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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
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Stockholm University
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SURF/University of Amsterdam
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Tufts University
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Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain)
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Universitat de Lleida (Spain)
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University of Arizona
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University of California Berkeley
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University of California, Davis
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University of California, Los Angeles
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University of California, Merced
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University of California, Santa Barbara
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University of Cambridge, CARET
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University of Cape Town, SA
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University of Colorado at Boulder
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University of Delaware
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University of Hawaii
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University of Hull
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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University of Minnesota
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University of Missouri
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University of Nebraska
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University of Oklahoma
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University of Texas at Austin
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University of Virginia
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University of Washington
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University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Virginia Polytechnic Institute/University
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Whitman College
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Yale University
New
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University of Melbourne, Australia
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University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design
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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
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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.
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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.
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Keeping track of
student progress
toward a degree.
More time for learning,
and teaching.
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Samigo – Testing and Assessment
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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
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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 48 colleges migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.
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Skins at Course Site Level
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Melete – Lesson Builder
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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
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Accessibility
metadata
Will plug in to TILE
from U Toronto.
Ability to check for lack of
compliance with Section 508
accessibility guidelines
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Student View – Navigation & Licensing
content
Navigation
is created
automatically
Authors can license their content
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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
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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.
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Building Contribution Community
• Receiving code fixes and folding them in
• Receiving large tools and working to integrate
them effectively
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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 to
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core release. All available in contrib area of CVS.
SCA – Sakai Commercial Affiliates
First Generation – Open Source Software Support
Support for the Sakai
codebase, or support of
Sakai users = SCA Member
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Sakai Commercial Affiliate Proposal
“IBM and Sakai:
Building a Successful
Learning Ecosystem
‘Second
Generation’
SCA Partners
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• Open Source Business and Learning
Solutions
• Interoperable Learning Content
• Reference Architecture
• SW Stack and Offering
• HW Stack and Offering
• Hosting Stack and Offering
• Code Donations
• ‘Commercial’ SW Expertise
• Global Marketing and Sales
Both universities and commercial partners
contributing code and expertise. Benefit of
open source strategy.
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and, recently…
• 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.
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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 Steven Weber
• 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.44
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
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So, join 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
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Summer Conference 2005
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)
Over 400 attendees
14 countries, 31 states, 5
continents
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(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.
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But, it is also…
The name of a famous Iron
Chef. (More fun!)
It is also:
Which has connotations,
we are told, of moving
across boundaries, of being
involved in a complex
situation.
Appropriate for us.
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Thank You
sakaiproject.org
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