[Using Sakai] Using Sakai] Home Page Components [and Templates

[Marshall Feldman]

On 24 Jun Peter Knoop wrote:
> Hi Marshall,
>
> As you have rightly concluded from Zhen's advice, it is aimed at those at an institution responsible for supporting Sakai's use; the system administrators, end-user support staff, instructional designers, etc.  That is the audience envisioned as handling this type of customization and configuration in Sakai.  How much of that flexibility is surfaced to you as an end-user varies from one Sakai deployment to another, depending on the set of roles and permissions an institution decides to define.
>
> In general, however, Sakai was designed to enforce site-level "standards" at a university-wide or departmental level over how sites appear and behave overall.  (Flexibility within tools within a site is generally easily accessible to instructors though.) This approach has been the general preference expressed by most organizations.  (One indicator of the preference for "institutional standards" to-date is the outstanding feature request in Sakai 2 to enable instructors to be able to modify the layout of their home pages, which has yet to generate sufficient interest for someone to address it; for any developers following along, this is SAK-7946<http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-7946> and related issues, which were posted starting in 2006.)  Sakai 3 will likely make it possible for the end-user to have much more direct control over their site's layout and content - assuming an institution decides such permissions are appropriate - however, Sakai3 is still early in d
>  evelopment and won't be able help you with this today.
>
> So I would suggest the short answer here is to talk with your local URI support staff, those responsible for administering and supporting your Sakai instance.  They should be able to work with you to figure out what you're permitted to do in the URI instance of Sakai, and help you with and configuration changes or template creation that might help you achieve your goals.
>
> There are definitely teachers on this list though, so hopefully you will find it a useful resource in the future in serving other "end-user" needs you might have, with best practices for teaching and learning and collaborating using Sakai.  You just happened to hit on a topic this time that most Sakai instructors aren't permitted to deal with most of the time.
>
> -peter
> Sakai Project Coordinator
>   
A few comments seem in order. Hopefully, they'll provide a different 
perspective on things.

   1. At my institution the "instructional designers" are called
      "professors." In other words, we roll our own and have no
      professional instructional designers.
   2. Everything I have seen about good pedagogy for e-learning says to
      incorporate the subject matter as much as possible into electronic
      resources. In my case, I teach a course on urbanization that is
      strongly oriented to urban geography. My current site on WebCT
      therefore has hundreds of photos, maps, and other graphics. One of
      my pedagogical goals is to get students to appreciate the subtle
      and important ways that space and place influence perceptions and
      daily life. Therefore, every page of my course has some graphic
      relating the page's function to some aspect of urbanization. For
      example, the link to the Course Calendar is a photo of a
      calendar/clock on the street of a city in Switzerland. The portal
      page to exams and tests has a big photo of an electronic sign in
      a  New York Subway station reading, "Please disregard. This is a
      test." The page with grading criteria has a large photo of street
      performers in a British city doing handstands, wearing thongs, and
      holding lit sparklers in their butts; the caption reads, "No you
      don't have to do handstands with a sparkler in your butt to get a
      good grade in this course. But what exactly do you have to do?"
      The unit on urban systems uses a photo of a map of global networks
      as both an icon on links to the unit and on the lesson page for
      the unit. Etc. All these photos and other graphics really add to
      the course, but they take up lots of screen real estate. I want
      the flexibility both to use that real estate and to integrate
      Sakai's tools into the overall look and feel of the course, rather
      than vice versa.
   3. The sole genuine advantage of standardization that I can see is
      that some students may be familiar with a course's look and feel
      and not have to learn how to navigate the site of a new course. In
      my experience, slightly less than half the students who take my
      course (about 75 per year) fall in this category. So, I have to do
      considerable hand-holding for the rest of the class anyway until
      they get used to using the site. I've developed several methods
      for doing so, and they're constantly evolving. The ability to
      customize the course home page around the course's organization
      provides major advantages in this regard.
   4. Other reasons for standardization are, IMHO, less legitimate. For
      instance, it makes things easier for the support staff. I'm not
      against standard templates for less technically skilled faculty,
      but I am against unnecessary restrictions on people who otherwise
      know what they're doing. Heck, if we adjust our work around what
      makes things easier for tech support, we'd all be writing our name
      in no more than 8 characters because of the doubleword size on
      32-bit computers. A couple of years ago the person who maintains
      the web at URI told me the University was going to insist on a
      standard format for web pages because this would "increase the
      prestige of the University." So I looked at web sites at Harvard,
      Princeton, and MIT, particularly comparing departmental pages for
      departments as diverse as Art and Physics. As you might expect,
      they were radically different and tuned to the departments' foci.
      One of the things I find most distasteful about the mindset of
      some university administrators is the practice of spin-doctoring
      as noble and beneficial steps taken to cut costs, impose
      uniformity, and increase administrator control but that also
      stifle creativity, regiment learning, and reduce education to
      training. Among the "most organizations" that prefer standard home
      pages, I wonder how many faculty members expressed this versus how
      many administrators did.
   5. As I've tried to learn Sakai, I've discovered several other
      institutions converting to it. Oxford University seems to have a
      substantial team of knowledgeable people working on the conversion
      over the course of more than a year. My university has 2-3 people
      who are learning Sakai, implementing the conversion over 4-5
      months, and still attending to their other duties. I got an email
      from a graduate student at university I had never heard of, and he
      works part-time and appears to be the sole person in charge of the
      conversion. In my experience, these three examples are symptomatic
      of what general professional life is like at different kinds of
      institutions, with the sole proviso that in return for the
      additional support faculty at top-tier institutions receive, they
      are under more pressure to publish and get grants rather than
      customize CMS software. Given this picture, it is not surprising
      to me that not many have responded to the feature request. At most
      institutions, only a minority of faculty care, and this is not
      necessarily high on the list of administrative and support people
      -- particularly those with the skills to do such development. I
      can't think of even a single individual at my institution, faculty
      or staff, who would be interested in the feature, have the
      technical skills to implement it, have the time to do so, and
      would be judged positively by their supervisor for doing so.

I'm not bringing these things up for the sake of argument. I was hoping 
that an open-source CMS would have and allow a level of creativity and 
innovation that was higher by an order of magnitude than the version of 
WebCT we were using. I am seeing some differences and advantages to 
Sakai, but not as much as I had hoped. This hope is not based on 
personal preferences as much as it's based on what I believe constitutes 
good e-pedagogy and taking full advantage of the technology's potential.

-- 
Dr. Marshall Feldman, PhD
Director of Research and Academic Affairs

Center for Urban Studies and Research
The University of Rhode Island
email: marsh @ uri .edu (remove spaces)


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