Today, a group of people from the CMS committees are visiting Indiana to talk with them about their use of ANGEL and Sakai. Some of my observations from today...
The Kelly School of Business is using both OnCourse (Indiana's implementation of Sakai) and ANGEL. They use OnCourse for on-campus instruction, but ANGEL for online instruction because of the tools in ANGEL and because having a separate system allows them to run course that fit their semester schedule (four semesters per year versus three for the rest of Indiana). All of their content is in ANGEL - they are not using an external system for content development and delivery.
The College of Medicine is running ANGEL as well and have said that one of the benefits of ANGEL is that you can organize materials in the Lessons tab into folders. As far as I have seen, Sakai has a tool-centric organization that requires a lot more navigation from one tool to another (e.g. from content out to the quiz menu and then into a particular quiz). During talks over the break, the OnCourse/Sakai users made it clear that Sakai was organized that way, but said that Sakai 3 should permit more of a lesson-centric organization. Hopefully, we'll see that today.
Michael Korcuska from Sakai just asked what our most important requirements are and it's everything plus the kitchen sink: scalability, availability, intuitive design, robust features, flow, being able to mine data, customization, etc...
Ball State arrived. They are Blackboard users and are considered leaving them because they are used to being able to get extremely responsive support from companies like Microsoft (who will fly someone in to work on an enterprise-level system) whereas Blackboard will get to the issue eventually, but not right away. With Sakai, the foundation itself doesn't provide immediate support, but you can use external companies like rSmart and Unicon to buy higher levels of support.
Indiana is talking about its migration from their old tool to Sakai, which took about two years. One interesting thing that they did was create a way for faculty to build a customized guide for the course by letting faculty select the tools that they were going to use and then view a user guide for just those tools. They also take a broad approach to training like we do: screen casts, workshops, 1-1 consultations, Knowledge Base, how-to documents, etc...
We've switched into a discussion of development in the open source community around Sakai. There are teams around each tool and a leader for each and if you want to make a change to a tool, you coordinate with the team leader and get the rest of the community involved. This is a pretty typical setup for open source products, but interesting to see this applied to tools that we are used to buying from commercial providers for more than a decade.
The Kelly School of Business is using both OnCourse (Indiana's implementation of Sakai) and ANGEL. They use OnCourse for on-campus instruction, but ANGEL for online instruction because of the tools in ANGEL and because having a separate system allows them to run course that fit their semester schedule (four semesters per year versus three for the rest of Indiana). All of their content is in ANGEL - they are not using an external system for content development and delivery.
The College of Medicine is running ANGEL as well and have said that one of the benefits of ANGEL is that you can organize materials in the Lessons tab into folders. As far as I have seen, Sakai has a tool-centric organization that requires a lot more navigation from one tool to another (e.g. from content out to the quiz menu and then into a particular quiz). During talks over the break, the OnCourse/Sakai users made it clear that Sakai was organized that way, but said that Sakai 3 should permit more of a lesson-centric organization. Hopefully, we'll see that today.
Michael Korcuska from Sakai just asked what our most important requirements are and it's everything plus the kitchen sink: scalability, availability, intuitive design, robust features, flow, being able to mine data, customization, etc...
Ball State arrived. They are Blackboard users and are considered leaving them because they are used to being able to get extremely responsive support from companies like Microsoft (who will fly someone in to work on an enterprise-level system) whereas Blackboard will get to the issue eventually, but not right away. With Sakai, the foundation itself doesn't provide immediate support, but you can use external companies like rSmart and Unicon to buy higher levels of support.
Indiana is talking about its migration from their old tool to Sakai, which took about two years. One interesting thing that they did was create a way for faculty to build a customized guide for the course by letting faculty select the tools that they were going to use and then view a user guide for just those tools. They also take a broad approach to training like we do: screen casts, workshops, 1-1 consultations, Knowledge Base, how-to documents, etc...
We've switched into a discussion of development in the open source community around Sakai. There are teams around each tool and a leader for each and if you want to make a change to a tool, you coordinate with the team leader and get the rest of the community involved. This is a pretty typical setup for open source products, but interesting to see this applied to tools that we are used to buying from commercial providers for more than a decade.