[Building Sakai] Resources Access via Database

[David C. Minugh]

Example 1 is what I'd like to see, but the "Show other 
sites" twizzel has a reaction time of 1-3 minutes when 
I use our version of Sakai, and is consistently like 
eating molasses in an Alaskan winter. I use it only 
because I am too lazy to learn to use webdav and reload 
everything into each site individually (as you will 
have gathered, I'm a user, not a programmer). Get that 
twizzel loading tme down to under 5 seconds, and I'd 
probably find it satisfactory.

Example 2 sounds much more interesting in the present 
scenario, especially variant 2, where students are 
simply told that there's another site; the down side is 
that they may not bother to switch to yet another 
tab/site, particularly as they might be in the middle 
of working in the site (e.g. working on a Wiki). Again, 
not a fatal flaw.

But I'd be interested to hear other solutions.

On 2012-01-24 15:34, Jim Eng wrote:
> It depends on the use-case you have in mind.  Below 
> are two examples and a short description of how you 
> can accomplish them in sakai 2.
>
> Example 1: Faculty in a department have a large 
> repository of shared resources they want to have easy 
> access to in all course sites within the department 
> so they can share individual resources on an 
> as-needed basis with students in the course.
>
> How to accomplish example 1: Create a special 
> repository site to which all departmental faculty 
> belong.  Upload all the resources to the resources 
> tool in that site.  Since about Sakai 2.1 (if I 
> recall correctly), the resources tool has a "Show 
> other sites" twizzle that appears in the resources 
> tool in every site.  The faculty members of this 
> department can find the repository site's resources 
> in the "Show other sites" twizzle under the list of 
> resources for each course sites.  Students will not 
> see the repository site unless they are added to it. 
> When a faculty member wants to share a resource from 
> the repository with students in a particular site, 
> they just select the "copy" command for that resource 
> and then paste it into a folder in the course site. 
>  At that point, the students can see the resource 
> within the course site's resources.  This mechanism 
> makes a copy of the resource for members of the site 
> it has been copied into.
>
> Example 2:  Faculty in a department want all students 
> in all sites to have read-only access to a large set 
> of resources. This is similar to example 1 except 
> that we want the students to have direct access to 
> the whole collection of resources in the repository.
>
> How to accomplish example 2: Create the repository 
> site and upload the resources as in example 1, but 
> give all students in the department read-only access 
> to the repository site.  This will cause the site to 
> appear in the "Show other sites" twizzle within the 
> resources tool.  It will also allow students to get 
> to those resources by navigating directly to the site 
> using the tabs at the top of the page.  And students 
> would also have access to those resources through 
> webdav.  BTW, students could be added individually or 
> by including them by adding their provider-id to the 
> realm (as is done for course sites at most university).

-- 

David C. Minugh                			E-mail: David.Minugh at english.su.se
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