[sakai-mobile] A Long Overdue Update

[Johnson,Douglas F]

Greetings All!

With profuse apologies for this long-overdue email, let me bring everyone up to date on the Sakai Mobile Initiative. Also forgive me for the length of this email; the good news is that positive things have been happening; and as a result, the overdue status of this email 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 he 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,

Doug

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Douglas F. Johnson, Ph.D.
Assistant Director for Learning Services
UF Information Technology
Turlington 1012 | PO Box 118461
352.392.2308
e-Learning Support Services: Hub 132 | 352.392.4357, opt. 3 | http://lss.at.ufl.edu

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