[sakai2-tcc] Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

[Matthew Jones]

Also a quick comment on this point, I also agree the OAE could be better
without so many competing interests.

I first saw OAE back at the Sakai Conference in Boston in 2009. The demo
seemed to be pretty cool and I thought wow this could be a pretty good
replacement specifically for Sakai CLE project sites. Some demos in 2010
with John Leasia locally made me feel that this was still on track. I
didn't know too much about the back story and didn't pay attention to the
politics.

At Michigan, project sites can be created ad-hoc along side course sites
and were pretty heavily used. A few years ago it was almost a 50/50 split
between course and project site creation. Project sites are very different
from course sites. Most of them don't have assignments, grading or
assessments. I've read through most of the work by Steve Lonn, a researcher
with the CTools group who spent a lot of time (and wrote
a dissertation about project site usage), that confirms the active usage
and specific usage.

"In the most recent term (Winter 2009), faculty created 4,000 course sites.
There are over 19,000 users  of the system per day and as many as 9,300
users are logged in at one time.  While only 41 faculty can create course
sites, all faculty, students, and staff at the university can create a
 project site and subscribe an unlimited number of members to that site.
Over 3,500 project sites were created in the most recent term. " [1 p 40]

It feels like after around 2010, too many people got on the OAE bandwagon
and kept forcing it to try to be a replacement either through the hybrid
of admittedly outdated (but functional) tools or prioritizing additional
typical LMS functionality. I like how Michael Feldstein mentions that it
was developed for the Cambridge model originally (which seemed more like
project sites) then seemingly tried to be retrofitted to an American model.
[2] It seems like selling it on that 2 years ago as a CLE complement or
replacement for just project sites would have been the ideal.

[1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~slonn/Steven_Lonn/Research.html
[2] http://mfeldstein.com/the-future-of-sakai-my-view/

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> I wil be quite honest, all of a sudden I have a lot of optimism about the
> OAE's efforts for the next few months precisely because they have decided
> to ignore all their "stakeholder input" and decided to just build something
> that will be pretty cool if they accomplish it.  What you might see is that
> the OAE team in the next six months will accomplish more with a tiny and
> shrinking budget than they accomplished in the past four years with a
> massive budget.  The reason that the OAE has a chance to be successful in
> the next six months is that they no longer have to listen to a cacophony of
> overlapping, contradictory, and impossible to accomplish stakeholder input.
>    Too much stakeholder input turned out to be the the reason that the OAE
> was unable to achieve its original project goals.
>
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