Sakai Project Overview

Hosei University IT Research Center Tokyo

May 13, 2005

Joseph Hardin,University of MichiganSchool of Information

Sakai Board Chair

KYOU / sakai

Boundary, Situation

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Two Challenges for IT in Higher Ed

Delivering sustainable economics to satisfied users, lowering cost of key infrastructure

Serving the frontiers of innovation for user expectations, getting faculty innovations in teaching and research available to a large community rapidly

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IUB Oncourse Growth

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Spr99 Fal99 Spr00 Fal00 Spr01 Fal01 Spr02 Fal02 Sp03 Fa03

Semesters

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cent

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Courses facultyX2 StudentsX2

Online Collaboration and Learning Environments are Key Tools for our Faculty and Students Now

Rapid, continuing growth in adoption.Just keeps growing.

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Challenge: Innovation Frontiers

Library Integration

Special Character SetsMath/Languages/Sciences Sophisticated Assessment

Streaming Multi-media

Direct Manipulation User Interfaces

Textbook Integrationw/ Publishers

Current CMSOngoing Maintenance

IMS/SCORM

Self-pacedTutorials

Research/CommitteeSupport

E-Portfolio

How will Higher Ed meet these growing requirements for CLE functionality in a period of relatively flat resources?

Workflow

Integration/Leveragew/Enterprise Services

Greater Personalization

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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.”

Sakai Project receives $2.4 million grant from Mellon

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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

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Why: All the simple reasonsThese 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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Response toSakaiProject in higher educationpress.

Quick andpositive.

Sakai will beinfluential.

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Michigan•CHEF Framework•CourseTools•WorkTools

Indiana•Navigo AssessmentOneStart•Oncourse

MIT•Stellar

Stanford•CourseWork•Assessment

OKI•OSIDs

uPortal

SAKAI 2.0 Release•Tool Portability Profile•Framework•Services-based Portal

SAKAI Tools•Complete CLE•Assessment Tool•Research Tools•Authoring Tools

Primary SAKAI ActivityRefining SAKAI Framework,

Tuning and conforming additional toolsIntensive community building/training

Activity: Ongoing implementation work at local institution…

Jan 04 July 04 May 05 Dec 05

Activity: Maintenance &

Transition from aproject to

a communitySAKAI 1.0 Release•Tool Portability Profile•Framework•Services-based Portal•Refined OSIDs & implementations

SAKAI Tools•Complete CLE•Assessment

Primary SAKAI ActivityRe-factoring “best of” features for tools

Conforming tools to Tool Portability Profile

Sakai Project Timeline

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Basic Sakai Strategy

• Build an open, world-class system

• Build framework for easy tool building

• Partner with like minded institutions

• Use/develop open source products

• Build international community of adopters and contributors

• Move innovation into tools quickly

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Sakai Project DeliverablesSakai Community – Committed and activeWorking 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

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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 HE

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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 (we think):

Which has connotations,we are told, of moving across boundaries, of being involved in a complex situation. (Right?)

Appropriate for us.

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Supporting the ClassSupporting the Class

Sakai as Course Management System (CMS)

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Supporting the LabSupporting the Lab

Sakai as collaboratories - support for online research teams

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CHEF-Based NEESGrid Software

NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05

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NMI / OGCE

www.ogce.org

NSF National Middleware InitiativeIndiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA

So, Sakai is plugging intothe high performance GRID.

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Open GridComputingEnvironment

Example:

Submittinga jobto the GRID.

Note research computing tools added on left.

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Bringing the lab to the classroom

Bringing the lab to the classroom

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Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan.Some example screen shots.

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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.

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Site/class home page

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Site Resources area

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Discussion tool – Forums

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Email Archive

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Site Info – class list

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So, More than a CMS

• Sakai more than Course Management System• Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment

Use for teaching/learning/research and many other online group activities.

Portal

Staff 1 Student

DiscussionForum

Middle East News Feed

DiscussionForum

ResourceManagement

Collaborative Project Portlet

ASUC Middle East Discussion Portlet

Staff 2 Staff 3 Student Student

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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.

• First semester of transition from CourseTools Classic; transition complete Fall 2005, CTC ‘turned off’; then we are all Sakai/Ctools at UM

• Running on big cluster of commodity Dell boxes; allows us to optimize as we provide stable service to large community; frequent rolls for updates

Doing fine…

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Sakai 1.0 ToolsAdmin: 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

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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)

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Sakai 2.0 (New Tools)

• Completely re-written Kernel (UM / MIT)

• Melete - Online classroom - lesson editor (Foothill)

• Grade Book (UC Berkeley / MIT )

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Tools from Partners

• FlowTalk (Cambridge)

• BlackBoard Import (U Texas)

• Xwiki (Cambridge)

• Mail / Messaging (Northwestern / Yale)

• WebDav Features (Rutgers)

• Many bug fixes…

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Some Sakai Partner ProjectsExamples of Early Community

Contributions to the Sakai Project

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The Berkeley Grade BookUniversity 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 ToolsThe University of Michigan’s Grad Tools provides

doctoral students a way of tracking their 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.

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Samigo – Testing and AssessmentPart of 1.5 release

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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

West Los Angeles CollegeLos Angeles South WestLos Angeles ITVLos Angeles City College Los Angeles Harbor College Los Angeles Pierce CollegeLos Angeles Mission College

Los Angeles Trade Tech Los Angeles Valley College East Los Angeles College

Mendocino College

Bakersfield College

Imperial Valley College

Taft College

San Joaquin Delta College

Foothill College

De Anza College

College of the Siskiyous

Lake Tahoe Community College

Mira Costa College

Coastline Community College

Porterville College

Skyline College

West Valley College

Chabot CollegeLaney CollegeCollege of Alameda

Vista College

Merritt College

Antelope Valley College El Camino College Glendale College

Long Beach CC

Gavilan College

Cerro Coso Community CollegeCrafton Hills CollegeSan Bernardino Community College

Santa Rosa Junior College

•Stephen F. Austin State University, TX•Harcum College, PA

Members Outside CA

* 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 colleges will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.

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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.

ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to ProductionETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production

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College Brand Skins at Portal Level

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Skins at Course Site Level

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Melete – Lesson Builder

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Linking to websites to supplement or support the content of a lesson

Composing content online using a WYSIWYG Editor

Uploading all types of documents for lesson components/content

This is MELETE

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Accessibility metadata

Ability to check for lack of compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines

Will plug in to TILE from U Toronto.

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Student View – Navigation & Licensing

Navigation is created automatically

content

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.orgTracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0

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The Twin Peaks ProjectSun 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.

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Library search as part of WYSIWYG Editor

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Accessing library collections from within Sakai

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Search results automatically pasted into text.

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Building Contribution Community

• Receiving code fixes and folding them in• Receiving large tools and figuring out how

to integrate them effectively– XWiki– Blog– Jabber Instant Messaging– SCORM player– RDF-based concept mapper– …

Growing area. Necessary to achieve goal ofrapid innovation within mature system.

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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.

Known Pilots and Production

• Boston University School of Management

• Carleton College • Foothill-De Anza Community Co

llege 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

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Sakai Community • Developer and Adopter Support

SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Community for ongoing development, adoption, support

• Commercial Support – SCA, IMSBased on open-open licensing – open source, open for commercializationSCA – Fee-based services from vendors include…

• Installation/integration, on-going support, training• Think of as “Sakai Red Hats”

IMS – working with CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks, e.g., WebCT, BB, Sun, etc.

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Sakai Educational Partner’s ProgramDeveloping the Community that’s Directing 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.

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Sakai Educational Partners – April 1, 2004• 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 UniversityNew• University of Melbourne, Australia• University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design

Institute

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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

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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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‘Second Generation’SCA Partners

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…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 drivingtowards collaborative, open systems for content creation, management anddelivery, as well as administrative and support systems. The institutions see opensystems as a way to reduce operating costs and a growing dependency onproprietary software vendors, and as a way to unleash the innovation andcreativity of their faculty and students. • Interoperable Learning Content: Institutions are driving towardsinteroperable learning materials (textbooks, tests, supplemental materials).Institutions increasingly are differentiating themselves in their effort to attractstudents 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…

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Reference Architecture: Working with a group of higher education leaders andpartners, IBM intends to publish a reference architecture for the higher educationindustry and to create an integration stack (…)SW Stack and Offering: With the Sakai application as the core, IBM plans to buildan end-to-end software stack(…)HW Stack and Offering: Building on the software stack, the next logical step is tobuild a combined software/hardware stack and provide clients with what we arecalling 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 ofcommercially 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(…)

What IBM plans to do with Sakai Project…

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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.

What IBM plans to do… 2

For those wanting commercial support

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And, interestingly…• Sun

• Apple

• UnisysAre 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• We learn from experience and add to

our common stock of knowledge; we are learning institutions, after all.

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“Community source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models.”

Community Source Projects

“Community Investmentsfor Community Outcomes”

Thanks to Brad Wheeler

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Part of Much larger Whole

• Multiplying Open Source Efforts• integration, standards…innovation

• Figuring out how to work together • Development, operations, maintenance, timing,

evolution, building open source community in HE

PKIDartmouth

Chandler/Westwood

Twin PeaksNavigator

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Summer Conference 2005Part of

Community Source Week

Conference Co-Chairs SEPP Partners – Yale and Cambridge

Technical Description of 2.0- 3.0 Dev & Contrib Processes

Governance Discussion Underway Now

Baltimore, MD, USA

June 8-10 (soon)

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Thank You

Questions, Discussion