September 19, 2007
Building a Better Sakai
Colleges are keen to support Sakai, the open-source course-management system that has emerged as an alternative to Blackboard. But the software has been plagued by “fairly serious usability problems,” says e-Literate, and attempts to fix them have been “sporadic and fragile.”
Now there’s reason to be optimistic, e-Literate says: The nonprofit Sakai Foundation, which oversees the software’s development, is jump-starting a project intended to make Sakai more user-friendly. The project was devised this year but was put on hold while the foundation searched for a new executive director.
Michael Korcuska has now filled that slot, and the initiative, which is to last for six months, is back on track. Five institutions — Charles Sturt University, in Australia; Indiana University at Bloomington; The John Hopkins University; the University of Cambridge, in England; and Yale University — are expected to participate. —Brock Read
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You missed one participating partner. In addition to the five universities, rSmart is participating as a commercial partner.
— Michael Feldstein Sep 20, 09:51 AM #
I think you’ve overlooked a major aspect of the Sakai user experience effort to date: the Fluid Project.
The Fluid Project is an open source community dedicated to improving the user experience of other open and community source projects. Fluid includes members of the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student communities who have been working together since April 2007 to improve the usability and accessibility of these products.
Fluid builds accessible, rich user interface components that can be reused across web applications. Many of our components will enable new approaches to navigation and content management within a portal and learning environment. Fluid also provides design guidance and accessibility support for user interface designers and developers within open source projects, with the goal of building a strong community dedicated to inclusive design.
The Fluid Project is led by the University of Toronto, represented by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, with core participation from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia, University of Michigan, and York University. Many other universities are contributing resources and expertise. Corporations participating in the project include IBM, Sun Microsystems, and the Mozilla Foundation. The project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
One of the primary goals of the Sakai User Experience Initiative is, as Michael Korcuska puts it, to “interact in a meaningful way” with the work of the Fluid Project, and we look forward to working closely with the Sakai community and playing a central role in this effort. This is a topic that will be discussed, along with many other technical and user experience topics, at the upcoming Fluid Project summit in Toronto next week. http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fall+2007+Fluid+Summit
For more information about the Fluid Project or to get involved, please visit http://fluidproject.org.
— Colin Clark Sep 20, 11:09 AM #
And you also overlooked that Sakai seems to have no concern about the use of its system to facilitate copyright infringement.
— Sandy Thatcher Sep 20, 11:31 AM #