[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter February 14, 2013
Margaret Wagner
mwagner at umich.edu
Thu Feb 21 13:52:20 PST 2013
Sakai Newsletter
February 14, 2013
1. TWO WEEKS LEFT! Send proposals the for 2013 Apereo Conference!
2. Apereo (formerly Jasig and Sakai) Board Election Results
3. New Latin America Coordinator
4. Sakai 2.9.1 Released
5. HEC Montreal Ran a MOOC Using Sakai with 3000+ Students
6. Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award -- Open for Entries
7. Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award -- Help Needed
8. Google Summer of Code is on Again
9. Sakaigers' Den Spurs European Collaboration
10. Sakai CLE Community Survey
11. European Events Recap
12. Apereo Conference Planning Input --"Matchmaking"
13. Mobile Initiative Update
14. Events
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1. TWO WEEKS LEFT! Send your proposals for 2013 Apereo Conference (Jasig
and Sakai) by March 4
Time is running out to submit your proposal by March 4.
https://www.concentra-cms.com/cfp/p/apereo13
The deadline for this year's 2013 Apereo conference is two weeks away.
Please submit your proposal so we can learn from you in San Diego, CA, June
2-7, 2013. The conference is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with
your peers in higher education. What makes the conference so compelling is
YOU -- your success stories and your amazing work. You may submit a
presentation session, birds of a feather (BOF) discussion, or showcase
night demonstration. We'd love to hear about:
- Advances in teaching, learning, and research with technology
- Identity and access management
- New developments and features for products like uPortal, Sakai CLE/OAE,
CAS, OSP, Bedework, and others
- Exciting and innovative implementations of and integrations with Apereo
and other open-source software
- Information security
- Learning analytics
- Advocacy and awareness of open-source solutions (The 2-3-98 Project)
- and more!
The annual conference is a global networking point for developers, faculty,
administrators, advocates, support specialists, and others in the
open-source community. Join us in Opening Minds to Open Solutions!
Sincerely,
Ian Dolphin, Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
Patty Gertz, Associate Director, Apereo Foundation
Jim Helwig, Planning Committee Chair
Alan Regan, Program Committee Chair
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2. Apereo (Formerly Jasig and Sakai) Board Election Results
I am pleased to announce that the following candidates have been elected to
the Board of Directors of the Apereo Foundation, subject to ratification by
a meeting of the membership:
Alain Mayeur, President of the ESUP - Portail Consortium, IT Director,
University of Valenciennes (France)
David Kahle, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief
Information Officer, Tufts University (USA)
Dr. Douglas Johnson, Assistant Director for Learning Services, University
of Florida (USA)
Professor Shoji Kajita, IT Planning Office / Academic Center for Computing
and Media Studies. Kyoto University (Japan)
Sincere thanks to all the candidates willing to serve, and congratulations
to those who were elected.
Best,
Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org
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3. New Latin America Coordinator
For over a year, David Martinez of Universitat Politècnica de València has
acted as Latin America Coordinator between the Spanish Sakai schools (S2U),
the Foundation, and interested parties in Ibero America. I would like to
offer my thanks to David for all his efforts, and my thanks to UPV for
contributing David's time.
The new coordinator is Diego del Blanco Orobitg of Samoo. I look forward to
working with Diego to raise the profile of Sakai -- and other Apereo
projects -- in Ibero America. Thanks to Diego for taking on this
responsibility.
Diego's email is: diego.delblanco at apereo.org
A Spanish news page is now established at:
http://www.sakaiproject.org/news/%C2%A1bienvenidos-sakai
Best,
Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org
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4. Sakai 2.9.1 Released
Dear All,
I am pleased to announce, on behalf of the community, the release of Sakai
CLE 2.9.1 .
The Sakai CLE 2.9.1 builds on the Sakai CLE 2.9.0 release and adds updated
context sensitive Help documentation, several performance enhancements and
security fixes, and one hundred bug fixes.
Release notes:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+CLE+2.9+release+notes
Thanks to all in the worldwide community for your contribution to the
development, testing, and documenting of the release.
Best regards,
Neal
nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
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5. HEC Montreal Ran a MOOC Course Involving More Than 3000 Students Using
Sakai CLE 2.8
Dear Community,
HEC Montreal is proud to announce that it has successfully launched and run
a MOOC course involving more than 3000 students using Sakai CLE 2.8. You
can access our platform and create an account at:
www.EDUlib.hec.ca <http://www.edulib.hec.ca/>
The course called "Introduction au Marketing", which was taught in French,
was launched in November 2012 and ran through early January 2013. Of the
4200 students who initially subscribed, 651 completed the course in its
entirety.
In order to complete the course, students were required to:
- Watch 6 hour of video (6 weeks of 1 hour classes)
- Complete readings for each week
- Pass online quizzes (using Samigo) each week
- Pass a final quiz (also using Samigo) at the end of the course
Additionally, students were invited to complete their profiles (using the
"Profile 2" tool), and to contribute to online forums. Over 1000 messages
were posted on the Forums. Finally, students could see their final results
through the Gradebook tool.
Many factors contributed to the success of this first MOOC experience:
- First, as far as we know it was the first MOOC offered in business in
French. Since business is part of everyone's life, subjects like Marketing
gather huge interest among the general public.
- Second, Sakai tools proved to be robust enough to support large numbers
of registered students.
- Third, server performance was constant despite peaks of over 1400 visits
a day (for a single course!).
- Finally, this project required minimal effort from our technical teams
since all the tools used are included in the Sakai platform. The project
could be launched quickly following a small amount of configuration to suit
our needs.
We are continuing with the MOOC's experience. The next course, "Comprendre
les états financiers" (« Understanding Financial Statements »), is to begin
soon.
Any comments or questions are welcome,
Marie-Odile Thibault
marie-odile.thibault at hec.ca
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6. Call for Entries for the 2013 Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award
The Sakai Teaching and Learning community is seeking submissions for the
annual Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) competition. The award
recognizes innovation and excellence in technology-supported teaching,
academic collaboration, and student engagement. (See last year's winners:
http://openedpractices.org/twsia/2012/winners )
Award categories include:
- Higher Education: Face-to-face
- Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course
- Primary and Secondary Education (K-12)
- Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai
- Portfolios
We look forward to entries from those using the Sakai CLE and those
pioneering the Sakai OAE (Open Academic Environment).
This year, the selection process will consist of two phases:
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Phase 1: Preliminary abstract submission (recommended but not required)
Opening Date: Feb 11, 2013
Closing Deadline: March 1, 2013
Each applicant should submit a brief description of the innovative teaching
method, practice or strategy to be considered for the final award.
Instructions and an example of a well-written abstract are included in the
submission form.
Applicants will receive feedback on abstracts by March 8, 2013.
Submitting an abstract is not required. However, the three questions on the
abstract submission form will be required for all applicants as a part of
the full application process. Those who submit a preliminary abstract may
edit their responses prior to submitting the final application, in order to
incorporate feedback from the judges.
The responses to these three items also will be used as part of the session
description at the annual conference.
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Phase 2: Final submission (required of all applicants)
Opening Date: March 1, 2013
Closing Deadline: April 5, 2013
Each applicant will submit an in-depth description of the innovative
teaching method, practice or strategy submitted and how it addresses the
award criteria.
Resources for applicants:
- Award categories
- How to get started
- Award eligibility, criteria and rubric
- Frequently asked questions
Winners will be announced no later than April 19, 2013 and recognized at
the Apereo (previously Jasig-Sakai) Conference in San Diego, California,
June 3-6, 2013.
Registration and travel expenses may be available for award winners.
Contact:
Salwa Khan
sk16 at txstate.edu
Texas State University, TWSIA Committee Chair
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7. Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award -- Looking for Help
Dear Community Members,
Work on the 2013 Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) is underway
and we need your help.
You can participate in the following ways:
- Be a committee member and assist with tasks to promote TWSIA.
- Be a preliminary judge to help select finalists.
- Spread the news about the award at your institution.
- Apply for the award once the application period begins.
We hope that you will consider joining us in our continuing efforts to
promote the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award.
Contact: Salwa Khan, sk16 at txstate.edu
Information about the award: http://openedpractices.org/twsia
Salwa Khan, Ph.D.
Coordinator, IT Projects
Texas State University
Instructional Technologies Support
sk16 at txstate.edu
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8. Google Summer of Code is on Again
We're pleased to announce that this year Google Summer of Code will be
happening for its ninth year. Please check out the blog post [1] about the
program and read the FAQs [2] and Timeline [3] on Melange for more
information.
[1] -
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/02/flip-bits-not-burgers-google-summer-of.html
[2] -
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2013/help_page
[3] - http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2013
Anyone interested in participating this year, as either mentors or
students? What about running our efforts? Ideas for projects? It would be
good to get this one planned out early.
Cheers,
Steve
steve.swinsburg at gmail.com
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9. Sakaigers' Den Spurs European Collaboration
In December last year representatives of European Sakai schools and
commercial affiliates came together and discussed ways to better
collaborate on Sakai projects. We observed that we often share things we
have done but less the projects we plan to do. There exist many great ideas
but they often don't get realized because one single institution or company
doesn't have the resources for it. And so the idea for a Sakaigers' Den
session at the Euro Sakai conference in Paris was born.
The one hour session is modeled after the popular British TV show "Dragons'
Den" in which entrepreneurs pitch their business idea in order to secure
investment finance from a panel of venture capitalists. The main purpose of
the session was to share a large number of ideas for new functionality in
the next version of Sakai with a broad audience in a short amount of time.
This could stimulate parties interested in similar projects to collaborate
to implement their ideas. At the conference 11 pitches were delivered. Each
pitch consisted of a 3-minute presentation of the idea and an
invitation/proposal for collaboration. After the session the audience was
asked to "invest" in the ideas they found most interesting using virtual
capital (i.e., play money).
Neal Caidin, one of the pitchers, commented afterwards:
"To me, the main benefits of the Sakaiger's Den are:
- that it is future-thinking, what we want rather than just explaining what
we have
- it is fun, and therefore engaging
- concise -- keeping presentations short also keeps it more engaging
- generates ideas and connections between people"
The clear winner was the pitch delivered by Jaeques Koeman of Edia who
presented his idea of Sakai CLE as a MOOC platform. Many conference
participants were interested in his idea and started a MOOC workgroup. The
workgroup aims to bring together MOOC initiatives within the Sakai
community and create a community-driven roadmap for Sakai as a MOOC
platform.
For more information on the Sakaigers' Den and an overview of the ideas
presented in Paris please go to:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/HwrnB
Mark Breuker
mbreuker at gmail.com
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10. Sakai CLE Community Survey
Dear all,
Please find enclosed a link to a brief survey to poll about your upgrade
plans for the Sakai CLE environment. Results of the survey will be shared
with the community.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XVR3HQK
The survey will be closed after Friday, March 1.
Your participation is appreciated and helps the community in release
planning.
Regards,
Neal Caidin
Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
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11. European Events Recap
There were around 170 total attendees for three days of Apereo and ESUP
related events in Paris during the last week in January. A two-day Sakai
Europe event (organised prior to the merger of Jasig and Sakai) at
Université Pierre et Marie Curie heard presentations from a range of
European participants in the community. These ranged from approaches to
mobile Sakai, and the features and benefits of the recent 2.9 release of
the CLE, to institutional stories from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,
Spain, Turkey and France. We'll post a link in the newsletter when
presentations become available online. A big thanks to Yves Epelboin and
his staff for organising the event.
One of the more interesting sessions of the event was the "Sakaigers Den".
Based around a popular TV programme from the UK, the session had presenters
pitching their idea for Sakai development to a panel of venture capitalists
-- the audience. The contest was won by an audience vote of 7800 dollars
for the Sakai CLE MOOC from Edia, with second place going to a pitch for an
Experience API from Alan Berg. Now let's make that real ... Thanks to Mark
Breuker of Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen for the idea adaptation, and to
Neal Caidin for facilitation. We're already working on ways to adapt the
approach to a session at the San Diego Conference in June.
The last day in January saw the 15th "ESUP Day" at Université Paris
Descartes. ESUP is a consortium of 72 French Universities who collaborate
around a variety of software projects. The conference shared best practices
around deploying the latest versions of uPortal, mobile developments, and a
status report from Sakai OAE. Presentations and an agenda are available
here: http://tinyurl.com/b5kqoh4
Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org
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12. Apereo Conference Planning input -- "Matchmaking"
Hi All,
Apereo Foundation conference planners are exploring the concept of
"Matchmaking." That is, finding institutions with similar interests to have
time and space to get together at the conference and discuss, maybe to swap
ideas, maybe to form connections within the community, or perhaps even to
collaborate on one or more projects or sub-projects. Does that sound like
something of interest to you?
Likely we will be tying this into the registration process and we would
like to keep this experiment as simple and organic as possible.
A couple of ideas of how this might work which have been floated, included
badges or stickers which you could wear at the conference and find others
with similar badges for spontaneous break out discussions, or more
facilitated discussions by pre-matching individuals/institutions with
similar self-identified interests and handling the scheduling of a time and
space for you to meet.
Questions collected at registration time could be anything from freeform
keywords or tags, through a few structured questions to get a high level
sense of which sub-community you have the most interest in (Sakai CLE,
Sakai OAE, JASIG, New incubation project, etc.), or even a combination of
these two approaches.
Does anybody have any thoughts on what might work or what to avoid? How to
keep it simple, but at the same time make it a useful exercise?
One thought I have is anticipating many institutions moving to Sakai CLE
2.9 in the near future, and perhaps a group that shares information about
their own planning efforts could provide and receive benefit among peer
institutions (a cohort of upgrade schools).
Would really appreciate any feedback you may have. Brainstorm.
Thanks,
Neal Caidin
Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
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13. Mobile Initiative Update
Greetings All!
With profuse apologies for this long-overdue update, let me bring everyone
up to date on the Sakai Mobile Initiative. Also forgive me for the length
of this update; the good news is that positive things have been happening,
and as a result, the overdue status means there's a lot to update.
So back to Summer 2012 …
The Jasig-Sakai Conference in Atlanta was a great event; and, no surprise,
I encountered a very high level of interest in a mobilized Sakai. I had
arranged both to do an update session on the Mobile Sakai initiative and
for a Mobile Sakai programming marathon; however, during the presentation
it became clear that there were few programmers available to make use of
the programming time. Fortunately, an excellent suggestion was raised
during the session that we should use the time for a "Use-Case-A-Thon" and
give potential users the opportunity to report on how and why they need and
want various mobile capabilities. So we did that, and for most of a morning
I met with various people -- instructors, students, programmers,
administrators -- to discuss how they envisioned using a mobilized Sakai.
The take-away was that users want *all* capabilities in Sakai mobilized,
but some institutions have significant questions about whether or not they
would want to deploy certain tools in the mobile environment. I'll say more
about this shortly.
So interest in a mobile Sakai remains high and is, in fact, increasing. At
the same time, it is very clear that our institutions are under increasing
budget pressures making it difficult to contribute programmer cycles to
this effort. This creates a seemingly insurmountable hurdle; and yet, after
the conference we have opportunities we have not had before.
Specifically, after banging ideas around with a number of people at the
conference, I decided to give up on trying to recruit and coordinate
volunteer time to do the programming for mobilizing Sakai and changed focus
to raising funds to contract with a programming team to do this work. This
has worked far better than I expected.
In short, after more discussions with Sakai leadership to work out the
legalities and logistics, I moved forward:
a) Writing up a formal project proposal and submitting it to the Sakai
Foundation Board for approval;
b) Soliciting volunteers to participate in a Steering Committee to advise
and direct the Mobile Sakai Project;
c) Identifying a formal project name: Project Keitai;
d) Working with the Steering Committee to identify a vendor to handle the
programming for this project and securing an estimate of costs from that
vendor;
e) Raising the required funds;
f) Writing up a Memorandum of Understanding with the Sakai Foundation
Board to define its role in managing and disbursing project funds for
Project Keitai;
g) Lining up the contract programmers.
Many of these details are already posted at the Mobile Sakai project site (
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MOBILE/Home), so I will not
repeat them here. Perhaps most importantly, the Steering Committee selected
Flying Kite, a Sakai Commercial Affiliate in Canberra Australia (
https://www.facebook.com/flyingkiteAU) to handle the programming for this
project. Flying Kite is Steve Swinsburg's company; so knowledge of and
familiarity with Sakai are obviously not a concern. I should also note that
all code developed under Project Keitai will be contributed to the Sakai
Foundation and will become part of the generally available code base.
I also want to point out that much of the Project Keitai work will focus on
updating and improving the Entity Broker. I am particularly excited by
this, because it has been suggested to me that updating the Entity Broker
is long overdue, and, of course this work will have beneficial implications
for the CLE far beyond mobile capabilities.
It has also been announced already (
http://www.sakaiproject.org/news/announcing-project-keitai) that the
University of Florida has agreed to fund Project Keitai. So the programming
resources to mobilize the Sakai CLE and the funding to pay those resources
are now in place. In this context I'd like to publicly thank my boss (Fedro
Zazueta) for his support and advocacy along with the University of Florida
CIO (Elias Eldayrie) for having the vision to fund this project.
Let me return to the issue of how a mobilized Sakai is now conceived.
As the Use-Case-A-Thon progressed, it became clear that a mobilized CLE (or
any course management system for that matter) has policy implications that
need to be addressed at an institutional level. For example, does an
institution want to enable the testing tools potentially enabling high
stakes testing on mobile devices? Institutions will differ in their answers
to that question; and institutions need to remain empowered to make that
and other related decisions.
Therefore, the scope of Project Keitai has been defined as creating the
"hooks" in ALL current core tools and a small number of selected Contrib
tools to enable those tools to communicate with mobile apps developed or
adopted at the institutional level. Project Keitai will not be developing a
mobile app itself. This accomplishes three critical objectives:
1. It will enable schools that have already developed mobile apps to
"hook" into the Sakai CLE without requiring them to adopt some other app
for Sakai access;
2. It will enable individual schools to decide which Sakai tools and
features will be mobile-enabled in light of local policies and practices;
3. It will enable 3rd-party vendors to develop and market mobile Sakai
apps for those institutions who do not have the ability or desire to create
their own.
I should also note that programming is targeted at the 2.10 CLE release and
will be back-ported to 2.9 to the extent possible.
So that's the 30,000 foot view. Where are we in the project details?
"On the ground" things have moved much slower than I would like; to a great
extent because Project Keitai was caught up in the broader currents of the
Apereo merger. As a result, legal review and approval of the Memorandum of
Understanding took about 3 months and the contract between the Sakai
Foundation and Flying Kite is still pending, but should be resolved within
a few days. I know some work has been done on the mobile code; but as of
yet, full-scale production is not happening. Furthermore, I have been in
contact with a couple schools and institutions (Oxford, Samoo) that have
already done some mobile code work on the CLE and are willing to
contribute; so that will expedite overall progress. In fact, Samoo has
committed up to 200 hours of programmer time to this effort; so grateful
thanks to Diego del Blanco Orobitg and his colleagues.
At this time, the projected timeline is that the mobile CLE code can be
developed in 8 to 9 months of full production. I had originally hoped that
we would be able to announce a fully mobile enabled Sakai at this Summer's
Apereo Conference; however, a this time I anticipate only partial coverage
by summer; but we do project having some significant improvements to
announce at that time. So a mobile Sakai is unquestionably on the way.
Bottom line: Project Keitai – a mobile enabled Sakai CLE – will happen. It
should also happen within this calendar year, barring further,
unanticipated delays.
Feel free to contact me if you have additional questions; and thanks for
your interest and support!
Peace,
Douglas F. Johnson, Ph.D.
Assistant Director for Learning Services
UF Information Technology
wanderer at ufl.edu
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14. Events
First Apereo Conference - 2013
June 3 - 6, 2013
San Diego, California
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JCON/Apereo+2013+Conference
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