NOTES

Sakai Austin, December 9, 2005
10:00 am

Implementation Plans
Panel Discussion

16 members on the panel including early production users and some more advanced production users.

Round of introductions and short description of either pilot plans or where they are in moving to a production implementation.

For your implementation or planning, how have you learned what you need to know?

RESPONSES
Mostly through collab and the developer list. There is a lot of information but it is not very easy to find or navigate. Also learned a lot here at SEPP.

Collaboration with other institutions.

Started with a commercial affiliate (rSmart), to help with the pilot and then use that to build confidence and faculty/admin buy-in.

The great collaboration and communication within the community.

The developer gatherings at Yale and Michigan, which helped not only get the information but make useful contacts.

Question from the floor about implementation at Univ. of South Africa. Seems like a very ambitious plan. Were going to rewrite two existing systems, but then found Sakai to be a better fit for their needs. Did a lot of teleconferencing and email communication.

Kirk from Davis, we're doing a lot of copying from Berkeley. Another developer conference at Davis in January.

From Floor: What was the most important factor to consider in terms of deciding to adopt? Basically the whole constellation of considerations is important: tech support personnel, faculty need/buy-in, administrative buy-in.

What has been the 1 biggest challenge in planning or implementation?

RESPONSES

How to make this work with very few staff, and trying to make it as low maintenance as possible. Running the system with 2 full time FTE who are working on Sakai part time.

Creating trust on campus with the user community after a very bad new ERP implementation that everyone hates. Making sure to be honest with user community.

At Berkeley was migrating faculty from Blackboard and WebCT to Sakai and helping them change work habits.

Portland State got into Sakai via adoption of Open Source Portfolio, and now really looking forward to the integration of OSP with Sakai. Don't have a lot of tech resources but they are participating by providing testing feedback to the developers.

At Stockholm U. the hardest part was getting faculty interested in the prospects of Sakai. Started with two faculty who were willing to be the guinea pigs.

Weaver State, just moved to WebCT 2 years ago and they are now trying to buck the inertia of staying with WebCT, although CIO recognizes that Sakai offers more long term benefits.

Having a trainer trying to train faculty in a system that she hadn't had a chance to work with until the night before the training. Also underestimated the degree to which some of the key tools in 2.0 were not ready for prime time.

Question from Floor: What is the QA process for implementing customizations?

Virginia tech has a QA team to do testing on the development server, and using Jira for internal bug tracking.

Columbia also running on short staff, with no dedicated testing team, but have been able to rely on the SEPP community QA team. The community has 52 testers representing 20+ institutions. The QA is largely informal, but there are more formal aspects of it.

U of M does about 2-3 weeks of testing on new builds of local campus instance of Sakai before release.

Pick and choose which tools you are going to use and just focus testing efforts on those and don't worry about the rest.

What has been the 1 biggest success?

RESPONSES

Implementing Banner system to automatically create and populate courses for Yale. That saved a great deal of time, and made it possible to run in Fall.

Faculty adoption and desire to continue using the system.

Exploring possibilities for new things that faculty can do now that they have Sakai to work with.

Just having a CMS up and running where they had nothing before.

Once we got the system up, having an integrated and mature-looking system for students and faculty to move into for Fall 2005.

IT support at U of M - load testing for the first time with Sakai with no worries about the stability of the system and the degree that that confidence was rewarded.

What is the 1 thing that everyone coming behind you should know?

RESPONSES

Buy 64 bit processors for your servers.

Keep your ear to the ground on the developer and support mailing lists. Take advantage of the community, it is a huge asset.

Don't start a technical implementation or pilot before you have a campus cheerleader for the project with the faculty.

If you already have a stable system in place, make sure that you manage expectations of the faculty and students. Control the buzz factor, because if it gets too far out of control you could get overwhelmed.

Be careful to manage your own expectations, it is not a turnkey system. You need to take a staged approach, with a small group of friendly faculty who are willing to test the waters. You WILL run into problems, so try to manage it.

What is the 1 thing you think that everyone ahead of you should know?

RESPONSES

The rest of us will continue looking to the pioneers for guidance and assistance.

Those of you who lead, know that the rest of us need help. We don't want to reinvent the wheel.

How do you know what other people don't know?

You sort of edge into the community and track down where the information is, who the players are, how the community works, but you never quite know where the system will go, so take advantage of the community.

What is your most loved feature, what is your most hated feature?

RESPONSE

The announcement tool is the best, the discussion tool is the worst.

Also like announcements, but also love the OSP.

Columbia: WebDAV interface to the resources section to make it so easy to upload resources. Most hated feature is the current discussion tool, and probably the email archive tool.

IU best feature is the resources tool, actually replacing the network filesystem. Discussion tool the worst.

Most hated Samigo and gradebook because of lack of section tool. Students have a hard time figuring out what their score really is.

Virginia Tech: Favorites are announcements and assignments, but don;t like some aspects of assignments like where the grades actually get stored, e.g. not in the grade book.

Serious problems with the gradebook, especially accurate data accumulation and reporting.

Berkeley the MyWorkspace tool for enabling collaboration.

Texas State: Before Sakai very hard to get any kind of mailing list. Now their users can do that themselves with the announcement tool.

What was the one thing that you learned from this conference that you will use to improve your implementation?

RESPONSE

How the APIs actually work and how to best take advantage of the APIs and the tools.

Portland State: The wide variety of really interesting and completely finished tools and new features since Baltimore. This highly accelerated development pace is invigorating, and gives us confidence that any problems will get fixed really quickly.

Dave Ross' presentation on Sakai for the little Guy. Offered the hope that Sakai can be run with limited resources.

Learned a lot from the various implementation talks.

Seeing the community and the energy in the community is the most important thing ton take back and convey. We are here to stay.

What people like about Skai is that faculty think it is easy to use. Also it is empowering because anyone can create a site to do whatever they want to do. It is very flexible, especially compared to commercial solutions.

Introduction for developers was excellent.

What is your next contribution to Sakai?

RESPONSE

How about video podcasts.

Improvements of the RSS news tool.

UniCon: Test drive site for people to play with Sakai without having to run your own. Site will open next week.

Lancaster: development of a whole suite of synchronous tools.

Portland State: Have code to connect Banner and Sakai for user and course provision to share with the community. Also a Blackboard migration tool.

Capetown: SPML web services to run within Sakai.

Columbia: Doing a lot of web services work especially for user provisioning in Perl.

ASU: Just finished a global question bank tool, but are interested in contributing that.

Berkeley: Continuing to improve the gradebook.

Working on a tool to do course evaluations.

Use the Contrib area in SVN. Just ask and then you can contribute your code with total control from your end, so use it.

Any questions from the floor?

None....