CMPSCI 520/620

Project 0: Developing a background

September 14, 2004

The goal of the projects will be for each group to carry out requirements, design, construction and testing of a component to be deployed within a Course Management System. The plan is to use the Sakai Project framework.

You should read about the Sakai Project at http://www.sakaiproject.org/ and at http://www.sakaiproject.org/conferenceJune_04/index.html

The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community source software development project founded by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The project is producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software with the first release in July 2004.  The Sakai Educational Partners' Program (SEPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and SEPP member contributions

You may wish to try and install the 1.0 release of Sakai, although David Miller is trying to install a version on several different operating systems. The current version can be downloaded at http://www.sakaiproject.org/ code.html

The Sakai Project build on the Open Knowledge Initiative which has produced a series of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) informed by a broad architectural view of the educational technology landscape. As learning management systems have become a core component of the campus information technology infrastructure, O.K.I. seeks to simplify and enhance the creation of educational applications. The OSIDs are an abstraction layer between the programmer and the enterprise infrastructure systems of his or her campus. Each OSID is characterized by a tightly defined set of methods and strict boundaries. For details, read: http://www.okiproject.org/specs/index.html

At some point soon, each group will need to select a tool to develop for the Sakai framework. Please read http://www.edutools.info/course/ as it serves as a good reference for comparing the current commercial CMS. Among the tools one usually finds in a CMS are: Discussion Forums; File Exchange; Internal Email; Online Journal/Notes; Real-time Chat; Video Services; Whiteboard; Bookmarks; Calendar/Progress Review; Orientation/Help; Self-assessment; Student Community Building; Student Portfolios; Automated Testing and Scoring; Online Grading Tools; and Student Tracking.