I attended the 11th Annual Sakai conference in Denver, Colorado, and had a fantastic time! For the last two years, I have been singing the praises of Sakai to all of the instructors that I support in the language departments at UNC. Attending this conference gave me the opportunity to share our great experiences with, well, the world! It was great to get to meet other Sakai users sharing and trading ideas. The great advantage of Sakai is that it is open-source, which allows institutions to share ideas and code in a way that is not possible with Blackboard. I am excited to see some of the new enhancements that we will be able to implement in the fall including a new “Tests and Quizzes” interface, a new syllabus setup, and other aesthetic changes. In addition to networking and attending informative sessions and demonstrations, I also made two presentations. 

My first presentation titled, “How Sakai solves the training and support challenge” looked at the training and support considerations for the ROML Sakai Pilot. There are over 4,000 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory courses in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.  Unfortunately, the tech support available to support the learning management systems for these languages is limited.  By transitioning these introductory language courses into Sakai, training and support has been more manageable while still allowing for instructors to have control over content and materials in the class.  The presentation slides can be downloaded from here and the presentation is below:

My second presentation titled, “How Sakai solved the multi-section problem for Romance Languages” looked at the ROML Sakai Pilot from a faculty perspective. The Department of Romance Languages has several large section courses, which can have as many as 45 sections taught by multiple instructors with one course coordinator.  Besides the coordinator’s own course load, he/she provides syllabi, assignments, and tests for the sections. Using Sakai’s section aware tools, these courses were moved from Blackboard to Sakai, which significantly improved communication and coordination between coordinators and instructors as well as benefiting students. You can view the slides from this presentation here.

All in all, it was a great experience, and I hope that more instructors will make the transition from Blackboard to Sakai.