UNC Sakai Pilot Evaluation: Video interview transcripts
Sakai Pilot Evaluation Final Report - October 15, 2009
Appendix E: Instructor Video Interview Transcripts
Download the full 74-page report in pdf format.
What surprised you most about using Sakai?
An interview with Jeffrey Pomerantz, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science
I think my biggest surprise when I first started using Sakai was what an easy learning curve it was, honestly.I've been using Blackboard since I was a grad student so I'd been using that for a long time.
Switching over to Sakai took very little effort. And that's actually, I think, a major selling point. It does pretty much all of the same things that the other tools that we're used to -- like Blackboard -do.
Does them a little differently. Things are in different places. But because it's similar, the learning curve
is very low. It's a very easy tool to make that switch. So, that was, I think, the biggest surprise. I expected that an open source project versus a commercial product would address LMSs really very differently and it would be a completely different architecture and it isn't.
And I think that's a positive thing.
What appealed to you about Sakai?
An interview with Phillip M. Edwards 
Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Library Science
One of the things I found really appealing about the Sakai Pilot Project was the ability for us at UNC to sort of customize and to design this tool that would fit within the context of this particular campus and the kinds of things that faculty were doing.
The flexibility that we would have as a campus or as an institution to really use this tool to support the kind of learning and engagement that we have on this campus.
So it wasn't necessarily something that we would take off the shelf and just plug-in and expect people to use but the idea that we could have some more iterative kinds of design decisions and discussions on the campus level about the way in which this tool was working for us and that we would have the power, we would have the capabilities here on campus to support that kind of development and support that kind of change.
Using Sakai for Committees
An interview with Barbara Wildemuth 
Professor in the School of Information and Library Science
A different kind of use that I've made of Sakai is for our committee work.
I'm Chair of our Masters committee here in the School which is responsible for setting policy for the Masters Program and also doing Masters admissions. And the committee has basically used Sakai as its home base for all of our work. We essentially haven't printed anything.
So I post the agenda for the meetings up there. If there are materials that we need to look at during the meetings, I post them up there. When I finish the minutes, those go up.
During a meeting, a typical Masters Committee meeting, we'll have Sakai open. And we'll have the agenda open and as we need resources, we can pull them up and discuss them and have them open.
The other piece of the committee work has been the applications and there again, we've been able to move completely to an electronic applications workflow through using Sakai, where the applications are received by the student services staff.
Once they're complete, they assign them to one of the faculty committee members to review. We write up comments. We forward those comments and the application then. We move it into another Sakai folder for our Associate Dean to review. And the decision is made and it moves on from there.
The nice thing about Sakai for that, again, is the granularity of the privacy settings so that only the faculty member committee members can see the applications. There are two students on the committee. They can see everything else but they don't see the applications.
So that's been a very nice, flexible way to incorporate student members on a committee and have the committee to be able to work effectively. We've been very happy with it.
How has using Sakai changed your teaching?
An interview with Craig Carroll, Ph.D. 
Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication
I would say the way that Sakai has changed my teaching is it's allowed me to develop more student-generated content and move more from the role of being a lecturer to more a facilitator and students doing some of the lecturing.
And actually, my role is kind of a gate-keeper to make sure that at least in terms of the contributions that people are bringing to the class that I'm more monitoring for quality. Making sure that the things that they're working on, the things that they are introducing themselves are something that's of benefit to the whole community.
For the courses I'm teaching, especially the Research Methods course, I try to focus on student-generated content. So we'll have exercises in class where sometimes I'll want to fact-check a statement and one of the forms of participation--since they all have computers--is--you'll just talk about something going on in the news and then someone will find information on it very quickly, and they'll share something in class that will prompt somebody else to find something else. And then the next thing you know, we have something here where we can integrate it all within Sakai within a matter of seconds.
The students can all stay where they are. And upload the content straight through their computers. We don't have to have something on the overhead. They can put it on their computers, give short mini-presentations from their seats. Everyone else can immediately see it where they're sitting.
And so it just increases the volume and quality of content that we can have within minutes.
Sakai teaching tools: Resources & Site Stats
An interview with Matt McMurray, Instructor & PhD Candidate, 
Department of Psychology
Sakai is, for my purposes at least, a classroom instructional tool that I can use to communicate information and materials to students very easily and quickly. All students can receive the information in the same amount of time. They can distribute information back to me. It's really flexible from that perspective as well, which I really enjoy.
The ease of use of Sakai has been very surprising to me. It allows you to essentially map a hard drive to your
computer and you can upload massive quantities of documents very quickly to your page and it will already be pre-organized and named on Sakai for you so it's very convenient in that respect to organize my site very quickly and clearly for the students.
It's also been very surprising how flexible it is because it allows me to upload videos directly to the course page, other instructional materials such as lectures and readings that my students might want to access--can be visible on the Sakai page not just through a link to someplace else. It's nice having one resource for all of that. I can manage my course calendar there, my own calendar there. It's very convenient one-stop-shopping.
I also just discovered a new tool in Sakai where I can monitor the student activity on the site so I can see who's downloading lectures, who's posting on the forum, very easily. I can see the percentage of times that each student has logged on to Sakai and accessed lectures or other course material.
So it's nice to be able to monitor my students from that perspective. To see who is actually using what resources and cater my teaching and my style to those resources that they're most using.
Blogging in Sakai
An interview with Bethany Kok, Instructor and PhD Candidate, 
Department of Psychology
I've used Sakai for 2 semesters now--2 sessions of the same class. And I
use the blogging capacity. I also use the wiki and some of the resource ability--giving students access to syllabi and Powerpoints and articles.
And so, when I'm using the blog, mainly what I do is I require students to write one entry and comment on two entries each week. And, I essentially encourage them to write about issues, questions that they have, experiences that they've had that they think really illustrate the ideas. They can link to videos--YouTube videos and things they think are really good examples.
If they disagree with me, I tell them this is the place to really write about that and have conversations. And so I really just sort of use it as sort of a student space. As long as they make the entries and comments, I don't really grade on content that much.
I really consider it an adjunct to their class discussions because we have 45 students. It's an introductory class so we really need to cover wide span of materials--that's our job: to introduce them to material to see if they like it and they can follow more. I don't have as much time to discuss in class as I would like so the blog, I think, really works well as a space for students to do more discussion. They comment, "I agree," "I disagree," "I have these ideas..."
I've seen a real increase in their...in the depth of their comments and their understanding. Over time, once I added the blogging, I really think that it does benefit them. I guess that what surprised me most is the extent to which students really take ownership of the space. If you tell them, "You can use this for whatever you want," they actually use it.
I require them to use blogs but I don't require them to do things like post polls and ask other students "What do you think?" and host discussions. I think that Sakai has that nice, flexible interface where students can make it what they want it to be. To a certain extent it seems more friendly and open than other course sites that I've used in the past. To a certain extent, I think it has a small resemblance to Facebook which makes them more comfortable--in terms of how it's set up. And so they can do all sorts of things with it and post media in there.
I think that's what surprised me the most--just students using it creatively as opposed to it being a discussion board or something very rigid where they have to "Do this, do this, do this." So that's been really a surprise--a pleasant surprise.
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