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News and Announcements
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rSmart Launches rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 |
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Project News
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Friday, 02 May 2008 |
rSmart has announced the availability of the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 at the JA-SIG open source conference in Minneapolis, MN. This represents the newest version of the industry’s first and only commercial distribution of the open source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). This milestone release comes early enough in the academic year that institutions considering a new learning management system can adopt Sakai in time for Fall semester.
The rSmart Sakai CLE is the company’s fully packaged, tested and supported distribution of the Sakai software. Similar to the way RedHat™ distributes and supports the Linux™ operating system, rSmart distributes and supports Sakai.
The CLE provides a feature-rich, fully scalable, enterprise ready software application that is unique in its ability to support teaching and learning, project collaboration, group interaction and ePortfolio construction. It offers an open source collaboration environment that is polished, customizable and fully supported by an accountable partner — rSmart. The company also provides professional services including Sakai assessment and planning, training, installation, integration and data migration, customization and application hosting to compliment its support offerings.
“More institutions are finding that the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 is a highly cost effective alternative to their older Blackboard™ or WebCT™ systems,” stated Chris Coppola, president of rSmart. “Institutions owe it to themselves to take a look at Sakai, or look at it again if they saw it years ago. It is amazing how advanced the software has become in such a short time.”
With over 30 educational institutions using rSmart Sakai CLE as the basis of their eLearning, ePortfolio, and online collaboration activities, rSmart is helping grow the number of Sakai users worldwide. Sakai, in use at more than 200 institutions globally, can be easily adopted by institutions with few to no IT resources through rSmart’s packaging, hosting and support services.
“Given our available resources it would be difficult for us to effectively use Sakai without using the rSmart Sakai CLE. With rSmart supporting us we benefit from the many innovations being driven by the Sakai community while allowing our few academic computing resources to focus on faculty and student support instead of technical support,” said M.L. Bettino, Dean of Academic Affairs, at Cerritos College. “We are looking forward to upgrading to the new release because of the many new features and enhancements being delivered.”
The rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 is available for hosted or on-site deployments immediately. To experience rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 please visit http://www.sakaisandbox.com to sign up for a free account or download a full, easy-to-install version directly from rSmart’s website. http://www.rsmart.com/
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Saginaw Valley State Adopts Sakai, Joins Foundation |
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Thursday, 24 April 2008 |
Saginaw Valley State University is pleased to announce its completed
transition to the Sakai CLE as the institution’s online learning and
portfolio system. We began in 2005 with an experimental OSP pilot, then
opened a Sakai-OSP setup to the campus in spring 2006. Now, we have
migrated over 2700 course sites and over 200 non-academic projects
(clubs, orgs, committees, department sites) to “VSpace” (our Sakai
brand). Additionally, we manage programmatic assessment for several
departments utilizing some OSP tools. Our stack always blends Sakai
core, provisional, contrib., and Foothill tools to produce a rich
learning environment and provide a flexible framework for digital
portfolio opportunities. When combined as such, the suite is flexible,
powerful, and stable for us. This is all possible in one cohesive system
due to the Sakai Project and its enthusiastic and hardworking
participants.
We are also proud to become one of the newest Sakai Educational
Partners for the next three years and look forward to continued fruitful
collaboration within this open community. The innovation advancements
here are difficult to keep up with, but it is loads of fun trying. We
aim to pitch into future efforts surrounding migration, archiving, and
importing processes, and to become more active in QA testing of Sakai
release code.
Blackboard’s BASIC learning system served SVSU since 2000 and will be
unplugged on May 14, 2008 (in just a few weeks!). Primary motivators to
migrate to an open-source system were to customize and enhance the
feature set and functionality, secure our LMS server, and unify
authentication and integration with other systems. All of that was not
possible without contracting one or more of Blackboard’s
enterprise-level offerings.
Special thanks go out to Noah Botimer, who built our first few Sakai
forks and taught us how to manage the code. We also send our gratitude
to Vivie Sinou and the Foothill de Anza team for their extensive work on
JForum, Melete, and, recently, Mneme.
The generosities extended to us via this list, Confluence pages, email
advice, JIRA details, future version road maps, excellent conferences,
shared tip sheets and tutorials, and countless words of caution and
wisdom have been priceless. A global network of support has proven to be
far more rewarding and effective than a contracted support professional
hailing from a stale corporate office.
If anyone would like to discuss migration practices, processes, or just
banter about how we pulled this off at a small state university, feel
free to contact me. I’d be happy to discuss it.
Thanks to all of you. We couldn't have done it without you.
Sincerely,
Dan, Jake, Bob, Leah
SVSU Sakai Team
Dan Tyger
dtyger@svsu.edu
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CampusEAI Announces New Hosted Sakai Packages |
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Monday, 14 April 2008 |
Cleveland – April 09, 2008 – CampusEAI Consortium (CEAI), a global not-for-profit information technology solutions, services and consulting provider, today announced its new pricing for its various Sakai Packages.
In 2006, CEAI selected Sakai as its best-of-breed eLearning platform. Today, CEAI provides comprehensive hosted solutions and services for Sakai. The CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai is designed to be tailored to each organization's requirements, time frames and budget and provides a full range of services including project management, installation and configuration, course migration, technical training and end user training, 24/7 Tier-1 technical support and end user support, student information system integration, and identity management integration.
CampusEAI Consortium (CEAI) has provided the following new packages for CEAI's Hosted Solution for Sakai offerings:
- CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai - Pilot Package @ $5,000
Up to 100 users
1 year term
Includes: Custom branding (logo), self-paced training resources and Sakai evaluation services.
- CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai - Basic Package @ $10,000 p/y
Up to 5,000 users
3 year term
Includes: Custom branding, LDAP integration, Support (email and toll free phone number) and self-paced training resources.
- CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai - Standard Package@ $25,000 p/y
Up to 10,000 users
3 year term
Includes: Custom branding, LDAP and SIS integration, Support (email and toll free phone number) and major upgrades, self-paced training resources, 2 day admin and 1 day train-the-trainer remote training.
- CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai- Premium Package @ $50,000 p/y
Up to 25,000 users
3 year term
Includes: Custom branding, LDAP and SIS integration, High Availability, Support (email and toll free phone number) and major upgrades, self-paced training resources, 2 day admin and 1 day train-the-trainer remote training and 2 days onsite training.
"We are pleased to provide institutions and organizations with cost-effective hosted solutions for Sakai,“ said Anjli Jain, Executive Director of CEAI. "The Pilot, Basic, Standard and Premium options allow campuses to rapidly evaluate and implement Sakai to support their teaching and learning needs.“
For more information on the Consortium's Sakai initiatives, visit any of the links below:
CampusEAI Consortium Announces Comprehensive, Hosted Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment Solution for Education https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=93,12323007&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
FIDM/The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Selects CampusEAI to Host and Support Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment for Education https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=93,12387009&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
University Of Windsor Launches Campus Portal With Secure, Single Sign-On To Sakai; CampusEAI Consortium Selected As Implementation Partner https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=93,12617048&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
FIDM/The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Launches CampusEAI Consortium Hosted Solution for Sakai https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=93,12831049&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
CEAI Hosted Solution for Sakai Overview https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=933,13181059&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
FIDM Launches Sakai – Snapshot https://ceai1.campuseai.org/pls/portal/docs/page/campuseai_new/images/FIDM_snapshot.pdf
CEAI joins Sakai Foundation as a commercial affiliate https://ceai1.campuseai.org/portal/page?_pageid=93,13045052&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
To receive more information on CEAI's eLearning solutions and services, contact info@campuseai.org
Anjli Jain, Executive Director
anjli_jain@campuseai.org
216-589-9626, Ext: 102
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OpeniWorld:Europe2008 Conference |
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Project News
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Thursday, 10 April 2008 |
For those of you planning to attend the Sakai conference in Paris, the OpeniWorld conference in nearby Lyon offers a tremendous opportunity to leverage your travel plans to encompass two great events. The OpeniWorld conference is the week prior to the Sakai conference. While the proposal deadline for OpeniWorld has passed, registration is still open. Here is the conference announcement:
Please join us for OpeniWorld:Europe2008, June 24-27, Lyon France
"Federating Resources Through Open Interoperability"
For its first European event, to be hosted in France by the Lyon 2 University (member of the Lyon University Consortium) in collaboration with MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative, OpeniWorld will focus its attention on resource federation, one of today’s key educational technology challenges. Federation offers much promise for inter-institutional collaboration towards more effective learning as well as significant market opportunities for providers and consumers of educational content, software and services.
Registration for OpeniWorld:Europe2008 is now open. You will find more information, including key speaker information, preliminary schedule, limited offer early registration and hotel packages, pre-conference activities, and pointers to Lyon area information at http://www.openiworld.org/. Note that the early registration deadline is April 30th, so please sign up soon to take advantage of reduced rates.
For more information about OpeniWorld:Europe2008 visit:
http://www.openiworld.org
And don't forget to register for the Sakai conference at:
https://sakai.educonference.com/paris/index.php
Best regards,
Michael
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Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska@sakaifoundation.org
mobile: +1 510-599-2586 // phone: +1 510-931-6559
skype: mkorcuska |
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Sakai Newsletter April 3, 2008 |
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Sakai Newsletter
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Wednesday, 09 April 2008 |
1. From the Executive Director
2. 9th Sakai Conference Proposal Deadline Extended
3. Announcing Mneme - Test Center 1.1.0!
4. Deadline Approaching: 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration
5. Web-based Innovation Award Application Ready!
6. Sakai Fellows Program Restarting
7. Test and Quizzes 2.5 (Samigo) Update
8. Melete & Jforum Now Available for Sakai 2.5
9. IMS Learning Impact Conference
10. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Upgraded Sakai with SCORM 1.2 Player
11. University of Delaware Adopts Sakai as its Production LMS
12. Portlet Development Training
13. Kuali Featured in Network World Open Source in the News
14. Kuali's Philip McKown to Keynote Conference on Technology and Standards
15. Register Today for rSmart's Upcoming Webinar
16. Senior E-learning Post: Oxford University
17. Unicon Technologists Will Present 15 Sessions at JA-SIG Spring 2008
18. Recent Email Group Discussions
19. Events
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Blackboard 138 Patent Re-examination |
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Thursday, 03 April 2008 |
As you probably already know, we learned on Friday, March 28 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a non-final action rejecting all 44 claims in Blackboard's U.S. Patent 6,988,138 as invalid. In 2006, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) requested a re-examination of that patent on behalf of the ATutor Community, the Moodle Community, the Sakai Foundation and the rest of the free and open source software world. The USPTO combined the SFLC request with a similar request from Desire2Learn. This rejection of the patent is good news for the education community and supports what we have believed all along--that the patent in question should never have been issued in the first place.
Because the SFLC request was accepted essentially without modification, their work on the re-examination is essentially complete and this concludes the current relationship between the SFLC and Moodle/ATutor/Sakai. We would like to thank the SFLC for their work on behalf of the entire open source community. We wish them continued success.
This hopefully marks the beginning of the end of this unfortunate and distracting chapter in the evolution of learning and collaboration software. In 2005, multiple companies and open source communities were productively innovating and competing to provide a range of educational tools. It is widely believed that the patent lawsuit impeded this healthy marketplace. At a time when there is considerable public pressure on the cost of education, this multi-million dollar patent distraction is not helpful. ATutor, Moodle and Sakai all urge a definitive end to this distraction that has been harmful to the free expression of ideas and tools for education. We believe the USPTO non-final ruling provides a basis to put this patent matter behind us and resume productive work without distraction. We urge all involved to make that so.
Best regards,
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Sakai Foundation
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
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http://source.sakaiproject.org/release
Sakai 2.5 incorporates a large number of refinements and refactoring
touches at both the tool layer and framework level, with over 1200 bug
fixes and 300 enhancements. One new provisional tool (Reset Password)
has been added, while two very successful provisional tools (OSP and
Tests & Quizzes) have been promoted to the enterprise bundle. One tool
(Discussion) has been retired, being replaced by other options (e.g.,
Forums).
The Sakai 2.5.0 release is dedicated to the memory of the late Marc
Brierley, a member of the Sakai community since its inception, whose
work as a user interaction designer at Stanford University helped shape
the Sakai release today.
In addition to the release highlights included at the end of this
message, more detailed information on the release is available from the
Sakai 2.5.0 Release Notes:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/-oHj
As part of the Sakai 2.5 release, we have also made significant changes
in our release process. New with Sakai 2.5 we extended our QA cycle to
include betas and release candidates, which helped further refine the
release though the work of early adopters in the community. Special
thanks go to the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who has been
running Sakai 2.5 in production since it became available as a beta
release in December 2007, and who contributed a great deal of assistance
and leadership in vetting the release and managing the 2.5.x maintenance
branch.
The commitment to future maintenance releases for Sakai 2.5 (e.g.,
2.5.1, 2.5.2, ...) represents another important improvement in the Sakai
release process. These maintenance releases are aimed at those in the
community who do not have the resources or desire to closely follow bug
fixing activity in the 2.5.x maintenance branch. The maintenance
releases will be created from the maintenance branch at periodic
intervals, with the Sakai 2.5.1 likely being released in the next month
or so. The maintenance branch and releases will be maintained for Sakai
2.5 for a period of two-years, or longer, if there is sufficient
community interest.
Thanks to all in the community who contributed to making this release
possible.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
-peter
Sakai Project Coordinator
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Sakai Fellows Program Restarting |
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Project News
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Monday, 24 March 2008 |
I’m pleased to announce the revival of the Sakai Fellows Program. I’ve update the existing wiki page for the program, but here is a quick summary:
* There will be 6 fellows per year. These can be contributors to Sakai in any area, from code to UX to evangelism.
* Terms will be 1 year and the stipend will be $2500. Conference registration fees will also be waived.
* The terms will start with the summer conference and go through the next summer’s conference.
* We would like to make the announcement of the fellows in time to for them to actually make it to the summer conference.
* Nominations are due by April 30th.
Please submit your nominations via email directly to me. You can find the nomination form attached to the wiki page, which is here:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/cS0
We also need volunteers to sit on the selection committee. So if you’d like to volunteer to review applications, please let me know!
Regards,
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska@sakaifoundation.org
mobile: +1 510-599-2586 // phone: +1 510-931-6559
skype: mkorcuska
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Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award (sponsored by IBM) |
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Project News
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Monday, 24 March 2008 |
Attention faculty: Are you excited about new ways in which you have been
able to engage your students using Sakai? If you believe that your
course transforms the learning experience, we want to hear from you. We
are looking for teachers whose courses best exemplify excellent teaching
practices combined with innovative solutions. Please share your story
with us and with other faculty around the world by applying for the
Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award. If you are the winner, you will be
awarded a modest cash prize, and a trip to Paris to participate in the
9th Sakai Conference, July 1-3
(http://sakai.educonference.com/paris). There you
will be recognized at an award ceremony and invited to showcase your
course. If you are the winner and unable to travel to Paris, an
honorarium will be awarded and we will work with you to provide an
electronic presence at the conference. Check out our self-scoring today
rubric to see how your course stacks up.
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Application Process and Deadlines
For more information and application go to:
http://openedpractices.org
The application process opens March 19th and the deadline is April 14,
midnight GMT. The winner will be announced in mid May.
A panel of judges who are well known for their work on enhancing
learning through the appropriate use of technology will evaluate the
courses and participate in web conferences with the finalists to select
the winner. The judges are Karen Swan, Professor at the Research Center
for Educational Technology at Kent State University, Ohio; Paul Elsner,
director of the National Center for the Future of the Community College
and former Chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District; and
Ken Bain, Professor at Montclair State University, and author of "What
the Best College Teachers Do."
Joshua Baron
Director, Academic Technology and eLearning
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12601
(845) 575-3623 (work) |
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Sakai Newsletter March 20, 2008 |
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Sakai Newsletter
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Monday, 24 March 2008 |
1. From the Executive Director
2. Paris Conference Call for Proposals Deadline: 31 March 2008
3. Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award, Sponsored by IBM
4. Portlet Development Training: 1-3 May 2008, St. Paul, Minnesota
5. You are Invited to Attend Kuali Days VI!
6. What's Coming Up? Mneme - Test Center 1.1
7. Program Published for "Higher Education Solutions: The Community
Source Way!"
8. Sharing Sakai End-User Support Resources: Whether you are ready to
share a link or just take a look, join us!
9. Tour a McGraw-Hill Online Course in ETUDES
10. 2007 Distance Education Survey Results: Tracking the Impact of e-Learning
11. Unicon Selects Greg Baker to Accelerate the Growth of its Higher Ed
Services
12. Sakai System Email Addresses
13. Recent Email Group Discussions
14. Events
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