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

2 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

3 Online Collaboration and Learning Environments are Key Tools for our Faculty and Students Now Rapid, continuing growth in adoption. Just keeps growing.

4 Challenge: Innovation Frontiers Library Integration Special Character Sets Math/Languages/Sciences Sophisticated Assessment Streaming Multi-media Direct Manipulation User Interfaces Textbook Integration w/ Publishers Current CMS Ongoing Maintenance IMS/SCORM Self-paced Tutorials Research/Committee Support E-Portfolio How will Higher Ed meet these growing requirements for CLE functionality in a period of relatively flat resources? Workflow Integration/Leverage w/Enterprise Services Greater Personalization

5 So, 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

6 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

7 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

8 Response to Sakai Project in higher education press. Quick and positive. Sakai will be influential.

9 Michigan CHEF Framework CourseTools WorkTools Indiana Navigo Assessment OneStart 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 Activity Refining SAKAI Framework, Tuning and conforming additional tools Intensive community building/training Activity: Ongoing implementation work at local institution… Jan 04 July 04May 05Dec 05 Activity: Maintenance & Transition from a project to a community SAKAI 1.0 Release Tool Portability Profile Framework Services-based Portal Refined OSIDs & implementations SAKAI Tools Complete CLE Assessment Primary SAKAI Activity Re-factoring “best of” features for tools Conforming tools to Tool Portability Profile Sakai Project Timeline

10 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

11 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

12 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

13 (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.

14 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.

15 Supporting the Class Sakai as Course Management System (CMS)

16 Supporting the Lab Sakai as collaboratories - support for online research teams

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

18 NMI / OGCE NSF National Middleware Initiative Indiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA So, Sakai is plugging into the high performance GRID.

19 Open Grid Computing Environment Example: Submitting a job to the GRID. Note research computing tools added on left.

20 Bringing the lab to the classroom Bringing the lab to the classroom

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

22 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.

23 Site/class home page

24 Site Resources area

25 Discussion tool – Forums

26 Archive

27 Site Info – class list

28 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 1Student Discussion Forum Middle East News Feed Discussion Forum Resource Management Collaborative Project Portlet ASUC Middle East Discussion Portlet Staff 2Staff 3Student

29 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…

30 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) 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

31 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)

32 Sakai 2.0 (New Tools) Completely re-written Kernel (UM / MIT) Melete - Online classroom - lesson editor (Foothill) Grade Book (UC Berkeley / MIT )

33 Tools from Partners FlowTalk (Cambridge) BlackBoard Import (U Texas) Xwiki (Cambridge) Mail / Messaging (Northwestern / Yale) WebDav Features (Rutgers) Many bug fixes…

34 Some Sakai Partner Projects Examples of Early Community Contributions to the Sakai Project

35 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.

36 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.

37 Keeping track of student progress toward a degree. More time for learning.

38 Samigo – Testing and Assessment Part of 1.5 release

39 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

40 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.

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

42 College Brand Skins at Portal Level

43 Skins at Course Site Level

44 Melete – Lesson Builder

45 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

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

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

48 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 Tracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0

49 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.

50 Library search as part of WYSIWYG Editor

51 Accessing library collections from within Sakai

52 Search results automatically pasted into text.

53 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 of rapid innovation within mature system.

54 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 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

56 Sakai Community Developer and Adopter Support SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Community for ongoing development, adoption, support Commercial Support – SCA, IMS 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” IMS – working with CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks, e.g., WebCT, BB, Sun, etc.

57 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.

58 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 University New University of Melbourne, Australia University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design Institute

59 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 Plus, the growing resources from industry

60 SCA – Sakai Commercial Affiliates First Generation – Open Source Software Support Support for the Sakai codebase, or support of Sakai users = SCA Member

61 ‘Second Generation’ SCA Partners

62 …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…

63 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(…) What IBM plans to do with Sakai Project…

64 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

65 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. ?

66 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.

67 “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 Community Outcomes” Thanks to Brad Wheeler

68 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 PKI Dartmouth Chandler/Westwood Twin Peaks Navigator

69

70 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, USA June 8-10 (soon)

71 Thank You Questions, Discussion