Sakai Project Overview Mellon Retreat NYC March 28, 2005 Joseph Hardin, University of Michigan, School of Information, Sakai Board Chair (University of.

Sakai Project OverviewMellon Retreat NYC

March 28, 2005

Joseph Hardin,University of Michigan,School of Information,

Sakai Board Chair

(University of Illinois alum – Go, Illini)

KYOU / sakai

Boundary, Situation

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The Sakai Project

“The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools.”

Sakai Project receives $2.4 million grant from Mellon

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Sakai Funding

• Each of the 4 Core Universities Commits– 5+ developers/architects, etc. under Sakai Board

project direction for 2 years– Public commitment to implement Sakai– Open/Open licensing – “Community Source”

• So, overall project levels– $4.4M in institutional staff (27 FTE)– $2.4M Mellon, $300K Hewlett (first year)– Additional investment through partners

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Why: All the simple reasonsThese are core infrastructures at our Universities• Economic advantages to core schools, partners• Higher ed values – open, sharing, building the

commons – core support for collaboration tech• We should be good at this – teaching, research

are our core competencies; collab essential• Maintains institutional capacity, independence• Ability to rapidly innovate – move our tools

within/among HE institutions rapidly Based on goals of interoperability -

Desire to harvest research advances and faculty innovation in teaching quickly

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But, What is Sakai?• Sakai is a project - a grant for two years.• Sakai is an extensible framework - provides basic

capabilities to support a wide range of tools and services – teaching and research

• Sakai is a set of tools - written and supported by various groups and individuals

• Sakai is a product - a released bundle of the framework and a set of tools which have been tested and released as a unit

• Sakai is a community – an emerging group of people and resources supporting the code and each other, and learning how as we go

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Sakai Project DeliverablesSakai Community – Committed and activeWorking Code – CMS/CLE- Collaboration and Learning

Environment – Sakai 1.0• Course management system – core tools plus

• Quizzing and assessment tools, [ePortfolio from OSPI], etc

• Research collaboration system• Portal (uPortal 2.3, 3.x)

Modular tools - also pre-integrated to work out of the box

Tool Portability Profile• Specifications for writing portable software to achieve application ‘code

mobility’ among institutions – modular tools and services

Synchronized development, adoptions at Michigan, Indiana, MIT, Stanford – Sakai 1.0 is the next generation for CourseWork, CHEF, Oncourse, Stellar

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Supporting the ClassSupporting the Class

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Supporting the LabSupporting the Lab

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CHEF-Based NEESGrid Software

NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05

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NMI / OGCE

www.ogce.org

NSF National Middleware InitiativeIndiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA

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Bringing the lab to the classroom

Bringing the lab to the classroom

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What is SAKAI?

• Sakai ≠ Course Management System• Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment

Use for teaching/learning/research and many other online group activities.

Portal

Staff 1 Student

DiscussionForum

Middle East News Feed

DiscussionForum

ResourceManagement

Collaborative Project Portlet

ASUC Middle East Discussion Portlet

Staff 2 Staff 3 Student Student

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Software Progress to date

– Releases on time 1.0 (2004), 1.5 (last month)– Production and pilots underway, in pipeline; – 2.0 forming up nicely for June; recent meeting

between Tools Team, Architecture Team and Board very good

– Processes being developed - organizational methods evolving rapidly; release engineering, distributed QA, contributions acceptance models, definition of enterprise bundle, methods for OS Core

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Sakai in Production at UM, IU Now• We have about 25,000 people using CTools in at

least one course at UM. That is about ~54% of candidate users at University of Michigan.

• There are over 1000 course sites representing nearly 2000 sections this term.

• First semester of transition from CourseTools Classic; transition complete Fall 2005, CTC ‘turned off’; then we are all Sakai/Ctools at UM

• Running on big cluster of commodity Dell boxes; allows us to optimize as we provide stable service to large community; frequent rolls for updates

Doing fine…

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In production useWith >25,000 users at U Michigan

Full Indiana Univproduction pilot started in January~4-5000 users

On to Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Foothill, MIT in 2005

Known Pilots and Production

• Boston University School of Management

• Carleton College • Foothill-De Anza Community C

ollege District

• Indiana University • Johns Hopkins University • Lübeck University of Applied

Sciences, Germany • Massachusetts Institute of

Technology • Northwestern University• Rutgers• Stanford University

• University of California, Berkeley

• University of California, Merced

• University of Cape Town, SA • University Fernando Pessoa,

Portugal • University of Lleida, Spain • University of Michigan • University of Missouri • University of Virginia • Whitman College • Yale University

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SEPP In Production

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Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan

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Ctools – List of Worksites – Classes, Projects

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Site/class home page

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Site Resources area

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Discussion tool – Forums

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Email Archive

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Site Info – class list

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Sakai Community Activities • Developer and Adopter Support

SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program Community for ongoing dev, adoption, support

• Commercial Support – SCA, IMS, maybe SPABased on open-open licensing – open source, open for commercialization- see ECL at sakaiproject.orgSCA – Fee-based services from vendors include…

• Installation/integration, on-going support, training• Think of as “Sakai Red Hats”

IMS – working with other CLE/CMS vendors on interoperability between frameworks

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Sakai Educational Partner’s ProgramDeveloping the Community that’s Directing the

Source.• Membership Fee: US$10K per year ($5K for smaller

schools), 3 years • Access to SEPP staff

– Community development liaison– SEPP developers, documentation writers

• Invitation to Sakai Partners Conferences– Developer training for the TPP, tool development– Strategy and implementation workshops– Software exchange for partner-developed tools

• Seat at the Table as Sakai Develops

The success of the SEPP effort will determine

The long term success of the project.

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Sakai Educational Partners - Feb 1, 2004• Arizona State University• Boston University School of Management• Brown University • Carleton College• Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching• Carnegie Mellon University• Coastline Community College• Columbia University• Community College of Southern Nevada• Cornell University• Dartmouth College• Florida Community College/Jacksonville• Foothill-De Anza Community College• Franklin University• Georgetown University• Harvard University• Johns Hopkins University• Lubeck University of Applied Sciences• Maricopa County Community College• Monash University• Nagoya University• New York University• Northeastern University• North-West University (SA)• Northwestern University• Ohio State University• Portland State University• Princeton University• Roskilde University (Denmark)• Rutgers University• Simon Fraser University• State University of New York

• Stockholm University • SURF/University of Amsterdam• Tufts University• Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain)• Universitat de Lleida (Spain)• University of Arizona• University of California Berkeley• University of California, Davis• University of California, Los Angeles• University of California, Merced• University of California, Santa Barbara• University of Cambridge, CARET• University of Cape Town, SA• University of Colorado at Boulder• University of Delaware• University of Hawaii• University of Hull• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign• University of Minnesota• University of Missouri• University of Nebraska• University of Oklahoma• University of Texas at Austin• University of Virginia• University of Washington• University of Wisconsin, Madison• Virginia Polytechnic Institute/University• Whitman College• Yale UniversityIn Process• University of Melbourne, Australia• University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design

Institute

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The Sakai Community• Main site: www.sakaiproject.org – outward looking• Bugs: bugs.sakaiproject.org – open, active• Sakai-wide collaboration area

– collab.sakaiproject.org; sakai work sites, discussion lists, resources areas; working instance of Sakai

– [email protected] – open mail list, active– [email protected] – open mail list, active

• Sakai Educational Partners (SEPP)– Separate mailing lists, discussion areas; for internal use– Dedicated staff – technical and admin support– Two conferences per year; regular VTCs, phone calls

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-- Messaggio Originale – From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 7:20 AM To: sakai-dev Subject: Re: Add tools to a site

Antonio Palermo wrote: I've developed a sakai tool ad I've registered it. To add this tool in a site I manually added it in the file /usr/local/sakai/db/site.xml. Now all works well. Does exist a better way for adding tools to a site?

Working as a larger community -Question Comes from the Public:

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Subject:     RE: Add tools to a site Date:     Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:54:05 -0500 (EST) From:     Trevor Bradley <[email protected]> To:     sakai-dev <[email protected]>

Hello Antonio, I was going through the exact same problem several weeks back.  I also got trapped into the "Worksite Setup" tool, which looks like it's hard-coded only to add a few set, sakai core tools. The procedure to add a new tool is: Log in to your sakai server as admin/admin Create a new site: Click "Sites" at the left sidebar, and fill in the data fields Create a new page: *Before* clicking Save, click the pages button. (… and so on …)

Answer comes from a SEPP Partner.Common occurrence now.

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Sakaipedia – Home Page

Filling growing need for info, and To distribute effort of generating it.

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Top Level Structure

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Goals

• Provide an easy to maintain source of information on Sakai in all of its aspects.

• Engage the Sakai community in creating and maintaining content.

• Organize information to enable browsing as well as keyword search.

• Establish a dialog around Sakai topics.

34Sakai KB – Experimenting with a local success

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Discussion GroupsCore of the OS Community

• Discussion Groups are the high level organizational, and organizing, foci

• They are established as members show interest by supporting and participating, and running them

• They are your responsibility• SEPP Staff is focused on support of these

If you want to see something happen, then make it happen – Start out with the Discussion Group

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Importance of Discussion Groups•Transparency•Coordination•Seed ground of ideas•Competitive filter for ideas – peer review of suggestions•High level chunking of interests and functional relationships•Spawning ground of Work Groups – where focus is narrowed, and actual development stream begun – also where efforts like support are centered (not all activities are software development)•WGs should be associated with a more general DG to help communication – eg, UI Review Team (a WG) should participate in the User Interface DG

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SEPP DG Leads

• SEPP Content and Authoring – Dirk Herr-Hoyman, University of Wisconsin

• SEPP Cross Language – Tom Lewis, University of Washington• SEPP Development – Mark J. Norton, Senior Technical Consultant• SEPP Library & Digital Repositories – Bill Parod, Northwestern

University and Jim Martino, John Hopkins University• SEPP Migration Strategy – Robert Catalano, Columbia University• SEPP Requirements – Mara Hancock, University of Cal, Berkeley• SEPP Strategy & Advocacy – Chuck Powell, Yale University• SEPP User Interface – Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth University• SEPP User Support - TBD

The people with the cool, unique logo on their shirts…

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Some Sakai Partner Projects

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The Berkeley Grade BookUniversity of California, Berkeley funded

development of an on-line grade book.

The UC Berkeley grade book is now in pilot on the Berkeley campus as a stand alone tool, and moving into pilot at IU.

It is part of the 1.5 release.

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Grad ToolsThe University of Michigan’s Grad Tools provides

doctoral students a way of tracking their degree progress from the point of choosing an advisor to degree conferral.

Doctoral students create their own site, which contains an automatically personalized dissertation checklist based on data from their department and from the graduate school. Students control access to their Grad Tools site, and use collaboration features common to CTools, including file storage, group email, email notification, structured discussion, and more.

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Samigo – Testing and AssessmentPart of 1.5 release

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Melete – Online Lesson Authoring Tool

Foothill College’s Melete, an online lesson authoring environment, is the classroom component of ETUDES (Easy to Use Distance Education Software) that is being rewritten in Java for Sakai-based ETUDES-NG. Melete offers instructors the ability to author online learning modules. Melete features extra controls to assist online teachers/learners, such as the ability to set prerequisites and the pacing of material.

The Hewlett Foundation funded deployment of Sakai for the District-based service provided to 48 California community colleges.

Part of 2.0 release

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Foothill College – Work with Sakai

Foothill College

With support from The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

• Tools Development• Skins Design• Adoption & Implementation• Pilots & Migration• Training Workshops• Performance Testing

Effort led by Vivian Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning

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300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red on next slide) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005.

Three colleges will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring.

All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.

ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to ProductionETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production

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ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots

West Los Angeles CollegeLos Angeles South WestLos Angeles ITVLos Angeles City College Los Angeles Harbor College Los Angeles Pierce CollegeLos Angeles Mission College

Los Angeles Trade Tech Los Angeles Valley College East Los Angeles College

Mendocino College

Bakersfield College

Imperial Valley College

Taft College

San Joaquin Delta College

Foothill College

De Anza College

College of the Siskiyous

Lake Tahoe Community College

Mira Costa College

Coastline Community College

Porterville College

Skyline College

West Valley College

Chabot CollegeLaney CollegeCollege of Alameda

Vista College

Merritt College

Antelope Valley College El Camino College Glendale College

Long Beach CC

Gavilan College

Cerro Coso Community CollegeCrafton Hills CollegeSan Bernardino Community College

Santa Rosa Junior College

•Stephen F. Austin State University, TX•Harcum College, PA

Members Outside CA

* 300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005. Three colleges will go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.

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College Brand Skins at Portal Level

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Skins at Course Site Level

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Melete – Lesson Builder

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Linking to websites to supplement or support the content of a lesson

Composing content online using a WYSIWYG Editor

Uploading all types of documents for lesson components/content

This is MELETE

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Accessibility metadata

Ability to check for lack of compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines

Will plug in to TILE from U Toronto.

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Student View – Navigation & Licensing

Navigation is created automatically

content

Authors can license their content

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Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI)

OSPI is a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of the leading open source electronic portfolio software.

The Open Source Portfolio software is individual centric enabling users to gather work products and other artifacts to be stored and shared with others but more importantly to be used for personal growth and development. The ePortfolio toolset is being developed on the Sakai infrastructure providing a stand alone application as well as an integration of rich portfolio tools in the full suite of Sakai applications.

Tracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0

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The Twin Peaks ProjectSun Microsystems, Inc. funded deployment of a

citation/link authoring tool by Indiana University.

The Twin Peaks project is an experiment in providing a search and one click selection of library electronic resources from within the Sakai authoring tool. The interim tool demonstrated at the December 2005 SEPP Conference provided searching of EBSCO Academic Preimer, ERIC, or the IU Libaries SFX enhanced online catalog's electronic holdings.

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Search as part ofWYSIWYG Editor

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Building Contrib Community• Receiving code fixes and folding them in• Receiving large tools and figuring out how

to integrate them effectively– XWiki– Blog– Jabber IM– SCORM player– RDF-based concept mapper– …

Growing area. Necessary to achieve goal ofrapid innovation within mature system.

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“Community source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models.”

Community Source Projects

“Community Investmentsfor ICommunity Outcomes”

Thanks to Brad Wheeler

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Reflecting on Our Efforts• Open Source Projects are crucial to

supporting innovation in higher ed• We have some examples now of ‘for

higher ed, by higher ed’ OS efforts• A literature is developing around the

dynamics of open source communities• What can we learn from experience and

add to our common stock of knowledge; we are learning institutions, after all

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Mobilizing across communitiesUniversity missions of teaching/learning, research, service• Sakai as online collaborative research tool• Sakai as learning environment• These communities often don’t know each other

– Source of duplicative efforts, uPortal, Jetspeed– Source of useful variation, innovation– Force standards to realize common benefits

• Communities can be co-mobilized to create critical mass• Provide alternate, complementary, adoption paths• Are software dev cultures different? Is this what allows

Sakai to think risky behavior natural sometimes?

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When Are Institutions Like PeopleIn Community OS software development efforts

this is a central question• Can you substitute institutional commitment for

individual motivations – if so, where?– What does Weber say about this – core of micro

analysis – you oughta read Steven Weber, btw– Can you use or leverage the similarities/differences

• Example of using institutional commitments to speed development, resulting in ‘pumpkin passing’, ‘bursty building’, with following re-merging of code, releases

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Sakai QA InitiativeDistributing QA

• Task is to establish a set of distributed methods for support of QA throughout the Sakai lifecycle.

• Developing methods for a community source effort; eg, Empirix contribution

• Others involved in this include people from Indiana University, University of Michigan, perhaps you (now over 25 people from numerous schools).

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QA Testbeds Emerging• Across the existing nightly build, stable

and production environments– Used extensively in 1.5 release

• Larger Institutional Investments Coming– At Foothill College– At University of Michigan

• Cluster separate from dev, dev-test and production• Will be available to larger community for load

testing; this summer, fall

Release engineering emerging as key community effort, widening participation.

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Open Source Changing Us• Moving across communities• Questioning value of hierarchy• Accepting, requiring responsibility• Adjusting stance to risk• Driving innovation from end-user through their

participationMoving action to the edges – like the net• Is OS changing us, and will we let it• Universities good place to try these experiments

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Sakai’s Future – In Process• Start-up grant ends December 31, 2005• Long term state starting January 1, 2006

– Sakai Core joins SEPP; we are all SEPP now– Governance is combination of representative (for

institutions - directions) and merit-based (like Apache – core and tools) – TBD, topics of governance debate

– Core elements of Sakai are pretty stable (see 3.0)– Sakai Project Team made up of SEPP, SCA funding

and contributed resources to maintain releases, provide support, take contrib and rapidly evolve core – central questions of what needed for this community

– ~$1-2 Mil/year staff and services budget needed; our current guesstimate; under active discussion

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Two Kinds of Governance• Governance of overall directions

– Processes of participation for institutions– Driven by contributions of support

Provides high-level direction for core development

• Governance of code development– Processes of participation for individuals– Driven by contributions of code

All tool development becomes province of DGs

Role of core support is release of Sakai bundle,and support of community processes.Role of core developers is guiding of framework.

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Community building – Transitions– Mellon Grant ending, core become SEPPers, SEPP growing– Communications – Critical activities, spike with 1.5 release,

Sakaipedia, merging maillists, sites; new models moving forward to distribute support as well as development;

– Governance – discussion in SEPP, June conference, transition foundations, DG activity, Institutions/Individuals

– Sakai Core – what is needed to staff a vibrant OS project of this type; delineation of needs from our experiences; business model

– Relations with other projects – OSPI, MELETE/Etudes, OKI, TwinPeaks, Kuali, ‘contrib partners’

– Relations with vendors – developing, deepening; announcements (rSmart/IBM), more on the way

– Relations with publishers – meeting at Sakai team meet in April

This coming year we reap the benefits of asuccessful software effort; sow seeds of longterm community effort. No slowing down.

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Summer Conference 2005Part of

Community Source Week

Conference Co-Chairs SEPP Partners – Yale and Cambridge

Technical Description of 2.0- 3.0 Dev & Contrib Processes

Governance Discussion Underway Now

Baltimore, MD

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Installing and Deploying Sakai

• Download Quick Start and follow instructions - 5-10 minutes - this is a developer edition with an in-memory database (HSQLDB)

• Install a real database (MySql, Oracle) and reconfigure Sakai to run in production

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Demo Sites

• Sakai - Collab.sakaiproject.org – running Sakai 1.0 system; open

• Sakaiproject.org – open info site; gateway to DGs and public forums

• Ctools – can get login if you want to evaluate and see production system; very similar to collab.sakaiproject.org

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Thanks