[Announcements] Sakai Newsletter August 20, 2009

[Margaret Wagner]

Sakai Newsletter


August 20, 2009


1.  From the Executive Director

2.  UC Berkeley News Article:  "Communal Webcasting Platform to Beef Up Campus's Popular Educational Content"

3.  rSmart Hosting a Free Sakai Training Workshop: Sakai Summer Institute -- Build a course in Sakai CLE

4.  Unicon Announces New Hosting Services for Sakai and Moodle

5.  Recent Email Group Discussions

6.  Events


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1.  From the Executive Director

As you may know, John Norman stepped down as Board Chair when he joined the Product Council. The Board has elected Josh Baron as the new Chair. Congratulations to Josh!

As Lance and Clay have stepped down from the Board entirely as part of their new roles on the Sakai Foundation staff, the Board Members are currently:

Josh Baron, Chair
Lois Brooks, Vice-Chair
Mara Hancock (appointed to fill Clay's seat for the remainder of his term)
Joseph Hardin
Stephen Marquard
John Norman
Jutta Treviranus

Lois, Mara and Joseph's terms will be ending this calendar year. Because the Sakai bylaws require a minimum 7 Board Members, we will likely be electing at least 4 new Board Members this election cycle (which will be in October/November).

As a reminder, the Board has proposed a revision of the bylaws to allow up to 2 appointed members. You can see the details of the proposal on the Sakai wiki: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/f4DnAw  The voting on this proposal will take place in September, so please get your comments in ASAP.

Cheers,

Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska@...
phone: [phone] (google voice)
skype: mkorcuska


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2. Communal Webcasting Platform to Beef Up Campus's Popular Educational Content

Published in UC Berkeley News http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/07/28_matterhorn.shtml

As a growing number of worldwide learners log on, free of charge, to video and podcast lectures and events at the University of California, Berkeley, the campus is leading an international effort to build a communal Webcasting platform to more easily record and distribute its popular educational content.

Dubbed "Opencast Matterhorn" and funded with grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett foundations totaling $1.5 million, the project will bring together programmers and educational technology experts from an international consortium of higher education institutions, including ETH Zürich in Switzerland, University of Osnabrück in Germany, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and Canada's University of Saskatchewan.

Through the Web, Matterhorn members from around the world will develop "open source" software designed to automate their recording and posting of academic content, making the process less costly and labor intensive. The $1.5 million in funding for the project includes $220,000 for planning and design activities that have taken place over the past year.

"Right now, colleges and universities want to provide their academic resources to students and global learners but are stymied by high technical barriers and costs. Opencast Matterhorn holds the promise of significantly lowering these barriers by developing open source software that meets the specific needs of academic institutions," said Mara Hancock, UC Berkeley's director of educational technologies and director of the Opencast Matterhorn project.

The software will support the scheduling, capture, encoding and delivery of educational content to video-and-audio sharing sites such as YouTube and iTunes, so that learners can access lectures when and where they need it. With additional funding, expertise and labor from other members of the consortium, the Opencast Matterhorn platform is scheduled to be up and running by summer 2010.

"Opencast Matterhorn entails more than just video capture and processing. It's also about tools and features that allow all of us to shape the media into something that's more meaningful for the learner to engage with," said Adam Hochman, UC Berkeley project manager for Opencast Matterhorn. For example, students and lifelong learners will have access to a suite of "engage" tools, including bookmarking and annotations. Coursecasting is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices. This latest innovation will solidify UC Berkeley's position as a leader in knowledge-sharing through open access Internet channels, campus officials said.

UC Berkeley has been making its academic content available to the public since 2001 and maintains a growing inventory of video content supplied by taped events and lecture rooms that are wired for automated webcasting. In 2007, UC Berkeley became the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Course topics include bioengineering, peace and conflict studies, "Physics for Future Presidents," "Environmental Law & Policy," and "General Psychology."

"Students and lifelong learners are becoming increasingly aware of the value of audio and video content that supports their learning, and universities are becoming more committed to providing that service to students," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley vice provost for teaching and learning and principal investigator for the Hewlett and Mellon grants. The project is very much in step with the campus's open source tradition. In the 1970s, UC Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group laid the foundation for today's open source community. The group developed Berkeley Software Distribution, also known as Berkeley Unix, whose popularity among academics led to the widespread adoption of the Unix operating system. Since then, UC Berkeley has played a leadership role in other worldwide open source projects such as Sakai, Fluid, CollectionSpace and Kuali.

As opposed to proprietary software, open source software makes its program source code available to the public, giving users access to core design functionalities and allowing them to tweak and add features. The software is licensed so that individuals are free to adopt and change it for their own needs.

Other institutions partnering in Opencast Matterhorn are the University of Vigo in Spain, University of Toronto, University of Copenhagen, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University in Illinois, Open University of Catalonia in Spain, Indiana University and the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia.

"Our partners have created their own version of an academic webcasting system, and so bring a wealth of expertise and lessons learned to the project," said Hancock. "Through this collaboration, Matterhorn will gain the benefit of that collective knowledge."

Yasmin Anwar
Media Relations


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3. rSmart Hosting a Free Sakai Training Workshop: Sakai Summer Institute -- Build a Course in Sakai CLE

Join us August 31, 2009 for half-day workshop! During this half-day workshop, attendees will create a pilot course in a live, hosted instance of Sakai. Participants will learn to build content, assessments, and encourage collaboration with Sakai tools. They will learn how to configure Sakai tools and course permissions and add students into the course. At the end of the workshop, each participant will have a course built that they can run for an entire semester.

Attendees need a computer with internet connection for the workshop. It is recommended that attendees have a syllabus on hand, as well.

Title: Build a Course in Sakai CLE
Day: August 31, 2009
Time: 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM-2:00 PM PDT
There will be a 60 minute lunch break given between 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PDT.
To register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/580074513

Megan Perrone
megan.perrone@...


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4. Unicon Announces New Hosting Services for Sakai and Moodle

Unicon, Inc. has announced new application hosting services for higher education institutions wanting to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of open source learning management systems Sakai and Moodle. Unicon's hosting service fully supports the community source code versions of the open source software, and delivers a feature-rich, fully functional learning management solution based on the comprehensive out-of-the box product capabilities available in Sakai and Moodle. Unicon's new services are designed to help academic institutions maximize their productivity and reduce TCO through offsite application hosting, outsourced IT services, and the use of open source applications and platforms. The program will enable institutions to focus their valuable IT resources on core competencies and mission critical internal projects.

"Unicon understands the challenges higher education institutions face when trying to maintain high IT service levels with ever-shrinking budgets," said John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. "Unicon's new hosting services for Sakai and Moodle will enable institutions to reduce TCO, while also improving the scalability, manageability and reliability of their open source learning management systems." Since 1993, Unicon's consulting group has provided over 175 colleges and universities, Fortune 100 companies and global publishers with software consulting, support and related services.

About Unicon's New Application Hosting Services -- Two of the fastest-growing IT trends for reducing TCO are the hosting of IT applications and implementation of open source solutions. Unicon's new application hosting services effectively combine these two strategies to provide significant cost savings and productivity gains. Academic institutions can select from hosting options with support for Dedicated Server Hosting or Cloud Hosting, providing either standard or high availability. For more information, visit:http://www.unicon.net/services/hosting.

Joe Waldygo
joe@...


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5. Recent Email Group Discussions

[Building Sakai] [WG: Sakai QA] Jira process clarification and modification - "Target Version"
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Jira-process-clarification-and-modification-Target-Version-td3484191.html#a3484191

[Building Sakai] Roster + cglib issue
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Roster-cglib-issue-td3489838.html#a3489838

[Building Sakai] site stats: counting .anon visitors
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-site-stats-counting-anon-visitors-td3490418.html#a3490418

[Building Sakai] 2.6.x branch version
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-2-6-x-branch-version-td3488028.html#a3488028

[Building Sakai] Sakai - Sakaibrary integration
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Sakai-Sakaibrary-integration-td3479370.html#a3479370

[Building Sakai] A Goal Management 2.6.x heads up
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-A-Goal-Management-2-6-x-heads-up-td3478943.html#a3478943

[Building Sakai] Load test of Sakai
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Load-test-of-Sakai-td3477487.html#a3477487

[Building Sakai] Site Helper and E-Mail messages
http://n2.nabble.com/Building-Sakai-Site-Helper-and-E-Mail-messages-td3479002.html#a3479002

[Using Sakai   Teaching & Learning] Thoughts on a New Focus for the Sakai Teaching and Learning Group
http://n2.nabble.com/Thoughts-on-a-New-Focus-for-the-Sakai-Teaching-and-Learning-Group-td3473008.html#a3473008

[Portfolio] scaling for university-wide portfolio
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-scaling-for-university-wide-portfolio-td3438350.html#a3438350

[Portfolio] IE8 and 2.6 Portofolios tool
http://n2.nabble.com/Portfolio-IE8-and-2-6-Portofolios-tool-td3345987.html#a3345987


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6. Events

AuSakai '09
September 17-18, 2009
Charles Sturt University Bathurst Campus
Bathurst NSW, Australia
http://www.csu.edu.au/division/landt/ausakai09/ausakai09.htm

1st Workshop: Learning Management Systems meet Adaptive Learning Environments  (LMS-ALE'09)
September 29 - October 2, 2009
EC-TEL
Nice, France
http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/lms-ale-09

The Jasig Fall 2009 Unconference September 28 - 30  Unconference sessions;
October 1-2  

Developer meetings  Urbana Champaign I Hotel and Conference Center University of Illinois
Urbana - Champaign, Illinois

Assessment Institute in Indianapolis
October 25-27, 2009
The Westin Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
http://www.planning.iupui.edu/institute

Online Educa Berlin 2009
December 2-4, 2009
Hotel InterContinental Berlin
Berlin, Germany
http://www.online-educa.com/the-conference

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