I spent some time at the ELI member meeting and I'm back to regular sessions now. Currently, Josh Baron from Marist College is giving a presentation about Sakai. He went through an LMS analysis and implementation between 2005 and 2008. Some take-away points:
Open source tools are decoupling code and service - meaning that the people who contribute code to Sakai are different than the people (often consulting companies like Unicon and rSmart) who are offering services like hosting, training, consultation, integration, etc...
To evaluate the tools, they did a gap analysis between their existing home-grown tool and Sakai with categories of desired, essential, or critical. Their goal was to make sure that there were not critical gaps and solutions for essential gaps. Faculty appreciated being a part of the gap analysis and followed the committee's progress. Through today, Marist has been able to close all of the essential gaps that they had identified such as a global student view (activity across all courses), grade import, weighing grades in the gradebook, and the ability to edit published assignments.
The evaluated staffing requirements by talking with other institutions and asking them about the number of FTE staff they had dedicated to Sakai, Java programming resources, instructional designers, end-user support, interface designer, etc... It depended on the institution. Michigan had 14 FTEs assigned to across various roles. Rice was more like 2 FTEs. Marist didn't need a lot of permanent new staff since they worked with rSmart to get started.
In the end, they were able to save money compared to a commercial LMS, they used the license fees to invest in human capital (e.g. an instructional designer), technical issues were quickly resolved, and student suggestions were incorporated into the tool. They are also using more than 20 tools that have been contributed by the Sakai community such as the citation helper that integrates their research journal database with the Sakai discussion tool.
How healthy is the community? They look at the size of the Sakai community, whether goals are being met, commercial affiliates, and potential threats such as the Blackboard litigation. They have also given some thought to reliability and scalability issues - such as giving all of their students lifetime access to their portfolio, which would grow their number of active users over time.
Overall, nothing too surprising, but it's interesting to have him walk through their process. It also makes me want to get an evaluation account on Sakai 3 to see if they have done some work on the instructor flow issues that I noticed in Sakai 2.
UNC has recently done an evaluation of Sakai in comparison to Blackboard, which includes faculty interviews and a final report. I'll need to take this with a grain of salt - they may be evaluating an older version of Blackboard, not version 9, which is the version that I tested.
Open source tools are decoupling code and service - meaning that the people who contribute code to Sakai are different than the people (often consulting companies like Unicon and rSmart) who are offering services like hosting, training, consultation, integration, etc...
To evaluate the tools, they did a gap analysis between their existing home-grown tool and Sakai with categories of desired, essential, or critical. Their goal was to make sure that there were not critical gaps and solutions for essential gaps. Faculty appreciated being a part of the gap analysis and followed the committee's progress. Through today, Marist has been able to close all of the essential gaps that they had identified such as a global student view (activity across all courses), grade import, weighing grades in the gradebook, and the ability to edit published assignments.
The evaluated staffing requirements by talking with other institutions and asking them about the number of FTE staff they had dedicated to Sakai, Java programming resources, instructional designers, end-user support, interface designer, etc... It depended on the institution. Michigan had 14 FTEs assigned to across various roles. Rice was more like 2 FTEs. Marist didn't need a lot of permanent new staff since they worked with rSmart to get started.
In the end, they were able to save money compared to a commercial LMS, they used the license fees to invest in human capital (e.g. an instructional designer), technical issues were quickly resolved, and student suggestions were incorporated into the tool. They are also using more than 20 tools that have been contributed by the Sakai community such as the citation helper that integrates their research journal database with the Sakai discussion tool.
How healthy is the community? They look at the size of the Sakai community, whether goals are being met, commercial affiliates, and potential threats such as the Blackboard litigation. They have also given some thought to reliability and scalability issues - such as giving all of their students lifetime access to their portfolio, which would grow their number of active users over time.
Overall, nothing too surprising, but it's interesting to have him walk through their process. It also makes me want to get an evaluation account on Sakai 3 to see if they have done some work on the instructor flow issues that I noticed in Sakai 2.
UNC has recently done an evaluation of Sakai in comparison to Blackboard, which includes faculty interviews and a final report. I'll need to take this with a grain of salt - they may be evaluating an older version of Blackboard, not version 9, which is the version that I tested.
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