Sakai Project Overview Mellon Retreat NYC March 28, 2005 Joseph Hardin, University of Michigan, School of Information, Sakai Board Chair (University of Illinois alum – Go, Illini) KYOU / sakai Boundary, Situation

2 The Sakai Project “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

3 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

4 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; collab essential 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

5 But, What is Sakai? Sakai is a project - a 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, and learning how as we go

6 Sakai Project Deliverables Sakai Community – Committed and active 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

7 Supporting the Class

8 Supporting the Lab

9 CHEF-Based NEESGrid Software NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05

10 NMI / OGCE NSF National Middleware Initiative Indiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA

11 Bringing the lab to the classroom Bringing the lab to the classroom

12 What is SAKAI? Sakai ≠ Course Management System Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment Use for teaching/learning/research and many other online group activities. Portal Staff 1Student Discussion Forum Middle East News Feed Discussion Forum Resource Management Collaborative Project Portlet ASUC Middle East Discussion Portlet Staff 2Staff 3Student

13 Software Progress to date –Releases on time 1.0 (2004), 1.5 (last month) –Production and pilots underway, in pipeline; –2.0 forming up nicely for June; recent meeting between Tools Team, Architecture Team and Board very good –Processes being developed - organizational methods evolving rapidly; release engineering, distributed QA, contributions acceptance models, definition of enterprise bundle, methods for OS Core

14 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…

15 In production use With >25,000 users at U Michigan Full Indiana Univ production pilot started in January ~ users On to Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Foothill, MIT in 2005

Known Pilots and Production Boston University School of ManagementBoston University School of Management Carleton College Foothill-De Anza Community College DistrictFoothill-De Anza Community College District Indiana University Johns Hopkins University Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, GermanyLübeck University of Applied Sciences, Germany Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of Technology Northwestern University Rutgers Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley University of California, Merced University of California, Merced University of Cape Town, SA University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal University of Lleida, Spain University of Michigan University of Missouri University of Virginia Whitman College Yale University

17 SEPP In Production

18 Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan

19 Ctools – List of Worksites – Classes, Projects

20 Site/class home page

21 Site Resources area

22 Discussion tool – Forums

23 Archive

24 Site Info – class list

25 Sakai Community Activities Developer and Adopter Support SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Community for ongoing dev, adoption, support Commercial Support – SCA, IMS, maybe SPA Based on open-open licensing – open source, open for commercialization- see ECL at sakaiproject.org SCA – Fee-based services from vendors include… Installation/integration, on-going support, training Think of as “Sakai Red Hats” IMS – working with other CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks

26 Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Developing 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.

27 Sakai Educational Partners - Feb 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 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 In Process University of Melbourne, Australia University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design Institute

28 The Sakai Community Main site: – outward lookingwww.sakaiproject.org Bugs: bugs.sakaiproject.org – open, active Sakai-wide collaboration area –collab.sakaiproject.org; sakai work sites, discussion lists, resources areas; working instance of Sakai – open mail list, – open mail list, 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

29 -- Messaggio Originale – From: Sent: Wednesday, November 24, :20 AM To: sakai-dev Subject: Re: Add tools to a site Antonio Palermo wrote: I've developed a sakai tool ad I've registered it. To add this tool in a site I manually added it in the file /usr/local/sakai/db/site.xml. Now all works well. Does exist a better way for adding tools to a site? Working as a larger community - Question Comes from the Public:

30 Subject: RE: Add tools to a site Date: Wed, 24 Nov :54: (EST) From: Trevor Bradley To: sakai-dev Hello Antonio, I was going through the exact same problem several weeks back. I also got trapped into the "Worksite Setup" tool, which looks like it's hard-coded only to add a few set, sakai core tools. The procedure to add a new tool is: Log in to your sakai server as admin/admin Create a new site: Click "Sites" at the left sidebar, and fill in the data fields Create a new page: *Before* clicking Save, click the pages button. (… and so on …) Answer comes from a SEPP Partner. Common occurrence now.

31 Sakaipedia – Home Page Filling growing need for info, and To distribute effort of generating it.

32 Top Level Structure

33 Goals Provide an easy to maintain source of information on Sakai in all of its aspects. Engage the Sakai community in creating and maintaining content. Organize information to enable browsing as well as keyword search. Establish a dialog around Sakai topics.

34 Sakai KB – Experimenting with a local success

35

36

37

38 Discussion Groups Core of the OS Community Discussion Groups are the high level organizational, and organizing, foci They are established as members show interest by supporting and participating, and running them They are your responsibility SEPP Staff is focused on support of these If you want to see something happen, then make it happen – Start out with the Discussion Group

39 Importance of Discussion Groups Transparency Coordination Seed ground of ideas Competitive filter for ideas – peer review of suggestions High level chunking of interests and functional relationships Spawning ground of Work Groups – where focus is narrowed, and actual development stream begun – also where efforts like support are centered (not all activities are software development) WGs should be associated with a more general DG to help communication – eg, UI Review Team (a WG) should participate in the User Interface DG

40 SEPP DG Leads SEPP Content and Authoring – Dirk Herr-Hoyman, University of Wisconsin SEPP Cross Language – Tom Lewis, University of Washington SEPP Development – Mark J. Norton, Senior Technical Consultant SEPP Library & Digital Repositories – Bill Parod, Northwestern University and Jim Martino, John Hopkins University SEPP Migration Strategy – Robert Catalano, Columbia University SEPP Requirements – Mara Hancock, University of Cal, Berkeley SEPP Strategy & Advocacy – Chuck Powell, Yale University SEPP User Interface – Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth University SEPP User Support - TBD The people with the cool, unique logo on their shirts…

41 Some Sakai Partner Projects

42 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.

43 Grad Tools The 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 , notification, structured discussion, and more.

44

45 Samigo – Testing and Assessment Part of 1.5 release

46 Melete – Online Lesson Authoring Tool 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 District-based service provided to 48 California community colleges. Part of 2.0 release

47 Foothill College – Work with Sakai Foothill College With support from The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation Tools Development Skins Design Adoption & Implementation Pilots & Migration Training Workshops Performance Testing Effort led by Vivian Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning

faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red on next slide) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of Three colleges will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production

49 ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots West Los Angeles College Los Angeles South West Los Angeles ITV Los Angeles City College Los Angeles Harbor College Los Angeles Pierce College Los 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 College Laney College College of Alameda Vista College Merritt College Antelope Valley College El Camino College Glendale College Long Beach CC Gavilan College Cerro Coso Community College Crafton Hills College San 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 Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 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.

50 College Brand Skins at Portal Level

51 Skins at Course Site Level

52 Melete – Lesson Builder

53 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

54 Accessibility metadata Ability to check for lack of compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines Will plug in to TILE from U Toronto.

55 Student View – Navigation & Licensing Navigation is created automatically content Authors can license their content

56 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 centric enabling users to gather work products and other artifacts to be stored and shared with others but more importantly to be 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. Tracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0

57 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 Preimer, ERIC, or the IU Libaries SFX enhanced online catalog's electronic holdings.

58 Search as part of WYSIWYG Editor

59

60

61 Building Contrib Community Receiving code fixes and folding them in Receiving large tools and figuring out how to integrate them effectively –XWiki –Blog –Jabber IM –SCORM player –RDF-based concept mapper –… Growing area. Necessary to achieve goal of rapid innovation within mature system.

62 “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 Investments for ICommunity Outcomes” Thanks to Brad Wheeler

63 Reflecting on Our Efforts 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 What can we learn from experience and add to our common stock of knowledge; we are learning institutions, after all

64 Mobilizing across communities University missions of teaching/learning, research, service Sakai as online collaborative research tool Sakai as learning environment These communities often don’t know each other –Source of duplicative efforts, uPortal, Jetspeed –Source of useful variation, innovation –Force standards to realize common benefits Communities can be co-mobilized to create critical mass Provide alternate, complementary, adoption paths Are software dev cultures different? Is this what allows Sakai to think risky behavior natural sometimes?

65 When Are Institutions Like People In Community OS software development efforts this is a central question Can you substitute institutional commitment for individual motivations – if so, where? –What does Weber say about this – core of micro analysis – you oughta read Steven Weber, btw –Can you use or leverage the similarities/differences Example of using institutional commitments to speed development, resulting in ‘pumpkin passing’, ‘bursty building’, with following re- merging of code, releases

66 Sakai QA Initiative Distributing QA Task is to establish a set of distributed methods for support of QA throughout the Sakai lifecycle. Developing methods for a community source effort; eg, Empirix contribution Others involved in this include people from Indiana University, University of Michigan, perhaps you (now over 25 people from numerous schools).

67 QA Testbeds Emerging Across the existing nightly build, stable and production environments –Used extensively in 1.5 release Larger Institutional Investments Coming –At Foothill College –At University of Michigan Cluster separate from dev, dev-test and production Will be available to larger community for load testing; this summer, fall Release engineering emerging as key community effort, widening participation.

68 Open Source Changing Us Moving across communities Questioning value of hierarchy Accepting, requiring responsibility Adjusting stance to risk Driving innovation from end-user through their participation Moving action to the edges – like the net Is OS changing us, and will we let it Universities good place to try these experiments

69

70 Sakai’s Future – In Process Start-up grant ends December 31, 2005 Long term state starting January 1, 2006 –Sakai Core joins SEPP; we are all SEPP now –Governance is combination of representative (for institutions - directions) and merit-based (like Apache – core and tools) – TBD, topics of governance debate –Core elements of Sakai are pretty stable (see 3.0) –Sakai Project Team made up of SEPP, SCA funding and contributed resources to maintain releases, provide support, take contrib and rapidly evolve core – central questions of what needed for this community –~$1-2 Mil/year staff and services budget needed; our current guesstimate; under active discussion

71 Two Kinds of Governance Governance of overall directions –Processes of participation for institutions –Driven by contributions of support Provides high-level direction for core development Governance of code development –Processes of participation for individuals –Driven by contributions of code All tool development becomes province of DGs Role of core support is release of Sakai bundle, and support of community processes. Role of core developers is guiding of framework.

72 Community building – Transitions –Mellon Grant ending, core become SEPPers, SEPP growing –Communications – Critical activities, spike with 1.5 release, Sakaipedia, merging maillists, sites; new models moving forward to distribute support as well as development; –Governance – discussion in SEPP, June conference, transition foundations, DG activity, Institutions/Individuals –Sakai Core – what is needed to staff a vibrant OS project of this type; delineation of needs from our experiences; business model –Relations with other projects – OSPI, MELETE/Etudes, OKI, TwinPeaks, Kuali, ‘contrib partners’ –Relations with vendors – developing, deepening; announcements (rSmart/IBM), more on the way –Relations with publishers – meeting at Sakai team meet in April This coming year we reap the benefits of a successful software effort; sow seeds of long term community effort. No slowing down.

73 Summer Conference 2005 Part of Community Source WeekCommunity Source Week Conference Co-Chairs SEPP Partners – Yale and Cambridge Technical Description of Dev & Contrib Processes Governance Discussion Underway Now Baltimore, MD

74 Installing and Deploying Sakai Download Quick Start and follow instructions minutes - this is a developer edition with an in-memory database (HSQLDB) Install a real database (MySql, Oracle) and reconfigure Sakai to run in production

75 Demo Sites Sakai - Collab.sakaiproject.org – running Sakai 1.0 system; open Sakaiproject.org – open info site; gateway to DGs and public forums Ctools – can get login if you want to evaluate and see production system; very similar to collab.sakaiproject.org

76 Thanks