The Opportunity

What are the opportunities for a project like Sakai to support the university mission? What are the pain points for teachers, students, and scholars that we can help to address?

• Increase access to education by supporting asynchronous distance learning
  • Create affordances that encourage teachers to share content
• Organize content and collaboration - for teaching and research collaboration
• provide place for research data to be used for teaching purposes
• evaluate impact of curriculum on core competencies
• create place where people can come together for the benefit of university
• increase time faculty spend on teaching - increase instructor time between teacher and student by reducing administrative load
• promote active learning and student engagement, switching from model where teachers just present to where students participate in their own learning - lifelong
  • provide students with self education skills
• less barriers between different roles: instructor, researcher, administrator, student
  • increased fluidity
  • reduce overhead involved in switching roles
  • embrace holistic roles (don't delineate when using tools or collaborative activities)
  • leverage one aspect of my role for another

• • repurpose learning objects or research objects
  • defragmenting our lives
• supporting synchronous distance learning
  • interacting with people real time
  • high degree of interactivity across distance
• increasing diversity of student body and research community
• shift from automating teaching processes to innovating

Sakai's Strengths as a Platform

What are the strengths the Sakai platform has to offer that could be useful for responding to the opportunities articulated above? What are the most exciting current capabilities? What is the potential based on the underlying technology?

• Open toolbox
• Flexible
  • flexibility of permissions - allows students to become agents of the class
  • screenlayout
  • choice of tools such as discussion tool
  • customizable UI
  • provisioning - course granularity, permission of roster
  • choice of language (national)
  • ability to allow students to create sites
• not restricted by licensing
• open content access - web services, open tool and data access
• loosely coupled nature lends itself to integrating around the edges, innovation
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Sakai's Strengths as a Community

What are the strengths the Sakai community has to offer that could be useful for responding to the opportunities articulated above? What are the strengths that the individual member institutions bring to bear? What are the strengths of the community and culture of the group?

• filled with generosity and compassion
• great place to learn
• open access to intellectual capital of hundreds of thousands of people
  • help solve common problems, operational, logical, library, repository
  • increased liklihood of other insitution with similar problems (and solved them)
  • similar student body and complimentary course offerings
  • collaborating on research relating to teaching and learning technologies
  • sharing content with platform - create community across platform
• rich network of education minded individuals

Sakai's Other Strengths

What strengths does Sakai offer that aren't covered under the headings of "platform" or "community", e.g., license, legal structure, etc.?

• have fun!
• good locations for conferences!
• forces commercial vendors to continue to innovate
• reference platform for all learning environments both open source and private source
• open bug database - transparent bug process - finding bugs, finding solutions
• transparency of designs, ability to participate in the process
• forces institutions to shift their resources from licensing fees to human beings - more university dollars for staff
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Putting It All Together

Given the opportunities and the strengths articulated above, how might Sakai be able to play a role in furthering the mission of participating institutions?

• Participate in open social initiative - Google Social, personalized learning environments
• Catalog system for research data/files, facilitate sharing across institutions
  • cataloging files, research data, articles, with metadata, becomes a research tool, teaching tool
  • allow universities to share catalogs
  • allow pervasive tagging of teaching and research content
  • tool independent catagorization/tagging system
  • cross instance searching
  • from a wiki, search through to a catalog to allow other members to collaborate on content
  • pull pieces together, defragment
• Work across instutions to solve common problems
  • For example, improve accessibility to resources for disability
• Resource rich institutions remotely hosting tools in Sakai
  • shared access to a telescope in an ideal geographic location
• Foster conversations around cross registration
• Individuals can pass into and out of different learning environments - between institutions
  • one institutions' students can get access to other learning communities across the network
• Open CourseWare - make courses public, accessible from a network of institutions
• Creating replicable process for education technology stakeholders to collaborate on development (teachers, UX developers)
• Build richer, more productive university-vendor collaborations