Over lunch, we have broken out into two groups. Mine is focused on instructional design and technology issues - mostly about large course management issues. It sounds like you are able to merge course sections together, similar to what we do. Sakai doesn't have an automated group creation tool - groups have to be created manually. Sakai does let you import from an old course "site" with a clean set of discussion boards and such. Roles within a course can have different titles and permissions (instructor, editor, teaching assistant, administrator, etc...), which can also be specified per tool.
For something like a master course, they have a site templating service that lets you copy materials from a central course. The URL redirecting function lets you make changes in one space and those changes work for sites that use the central resource - although those resources need to be set to have public access in order to work correctly.
One of the long-standing requests that we've had for a while is to allow a dropbox submission to be submitted on behalf of an entire group. While this isn't currently possible in Sakai, you can filter the gradebook by a group and then assign a grade to that group.
Back into a discussion about creating new tools - as of version 2.7, they are designing Sakai so you can have tools like the gradebook that can have improvements and be approved to work with different versions of Sakai. So you could have "Gradebook 2.2", which has been tested with Kernel version 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. With this change, it will be possible to upgrade certain features of Sakai without waiting for the annual core release.
We also had some time to run through some of the "critical" items from the checklist of features that the Pedagogical Committee created. So far, the course management, syllabus, and dropbox features look pretty good. I think we'll have to sit down with some of the other tools and do hands on testing. Overall though, some of my concerns that cropped up during the Michigan State visit have been set aside. We're going to see a demo of Sakai 3 and hear from some people who have experience with both Sakai and ANGEL this afternoon, so that should give me a better handle on what is missing and where Sakai is going.
For something like a master course, they have a site templating service that lets you copy materials from a central course. The URL redirecting function lets you make changes in one space and those changes work for sites that use the central resource - although those resources need to be set to have public access in order to work correctly.
One of the long-standing requests that we've had for a while is to allow a dropbox submission to be submitted on behalf of an entire group. While this isn't currently possible in Sakai, you can filter the gradebook by a group and then assign a grade to that group.
Back into a discussion about creating new tools - as of version 2.7, they are designing Sakai so you can have tools like the gradebook that can have improvements and be approved to work with different versions of Sakai. So you could have "Gradebook 2.2", which has been tested with Kernel version 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. With this change, it will be possible to upgrade certain features of Sakai without waiting for the annual core release.
We also had some time to run through some of the "critical" items from the checklist of features that the Pedagogical Committee created. So far, the course management, syllabus, and dropbox features look pretty good. I think we'll have to sit down with some of the other tools and do hands on testing. Overall though, some of my concerns that cropped up during the Michigan State visit have been set aside. We're going to see a demo of Sakai 3 and hear from some people who have experience with both Sakai and ANGEL this afternoon, so that should give me a better handle on what is missing and where Sakai is going.