Sakai & Vula @ UCT
Presentation to eLearning Update held at CPUT, Cape Town, 4 September 2009
Stephen Marquard, stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za, twitter.com/stephenmarquard
CY-BY-SA
1. Sakaie-LearningUpdate @ CPUTSeptember 2009 Stephen Marquard Centre for Educational Technology University of Cape Town stephen.marquard@uct.ac.zatwitter.com/stephenmarquard
2. Overview The product category and the industry About Sakai Vula: UCT’s Sakai implementation Where is Sakai going ?
4. Well, not quite. But reports of its death are only slightly exaggerated.
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6. What is Sakai? The Sakai Project is: Community: Educational institutions, commercial affiliates and other partners (112 members, more adopters) Code: open source, extensible, service-oriented, scaleable, diverse, 1.2m lines, 52 developers (ohloh.net) Foundation: Board and small staff which carries out co-ordination and community-building activities
8. Open Source in higher education Diversity is good Community is good Community spawns community: Fluid (rich accessible user interfaces) Kuali (finance & admin systems and workflow) OpenCast (webcasting)
9. Why did UCT choose Sakai? 2004: WebCT: low uptake, mixed opinions home-grown system: not sustainable Sakai decision was about open source vs proprietary: Allows us to deliver new tools and services We benefit from development by other institutions We can customize and extend the environment for UCT requirements Strategic value of being part of an international open source consortium Community with significant experience in educational technology Founded by MIT, Stanford, Indiana, Michigan, now 100+ consortium members (significant number in the global top 200 universities) Good integration with other enterprise systems (less administrative overhead, fewer support issues) Sound technical architecture (e.g. high availability through clustering, web services, open framework, APIs)
10. Sakai at UCT Vula was launched at UCT in Feb 2006 (2-year transition from legacy environments) Use is voluntary (encouraged but not required by UCT’s Educational Technology Policy) Vula is mostly used in support of campus-based face-to-face courses (relatively few distance or block-release courses)
11. Part of an eLearning ecosystem “Open UCT” Webcasting / video streaming incl. lecture captureOpenCast Cloud OER Directory OER content Turnitin Institutional repositoryDSpace/Fedora LAMS Live audio/video conferencingAdobe Connect CBT / Training / HelpVirtual Expert, SCORM Personal Learning Environments IMS LTI-enabled“shareable tools”
12. Vula Vital Stats Concurrent user sessions 91% of UCT students logged in to Vula at least once during 2008 (20,351 / 22,231) Up to 13,000 people log in to Vula every day 28,000+ people use Vula
13. Why do people use Vula? Bread and butter uses (esp. important for large courses) Announcements Course content Tutorial group signup and management Assignments (with Turnitin) Entering student marks (Gradebook) Tests and Quizzes Online discussion, student questions and feedback Course evaluations Student pressure (“other courses use Vula”) Course design requires online components (some courses can no longer be run only F2F) Provide support in learning areas where students struggle Support innovation in teaching and learning model
14. UCT students and staff love Vula Staff (n=148): 53% very positive, 42% positive, 5% neutral, 0% negative
15. Student survey highlights (Oct 08): Course use I would prefer my courses to ... use Vula extensively: 60% make moderate use of Vula: 31% Use of Vula has improved my learning 80% agree or strongly agree Most valuable benefit (choose one) Improved resource sharing: 23% Improved course administration: 21% Improved communication: 17% Improved my learning: 16% Improved my time management: 11%
16. Student survey highlights (Oct 08): Other use Valuable or very valuable for (top 6 in descending order, 51% to 40%): Student activism (e.g. Green Week) Student societies Student governance (e.g. SRC, Faculty Councils) Personal use (e.g. store work, backup files) Academic writing Participating in research projects
17. Student survey highlights (Oct 08): Using Vula I found it easy to learn how to use Vula 93% agree or strongly agree (30%, 63%) I can quickly do what I need to do or find what I'm looking for on Vula: 91% agree or strongly agree (33%, 58%) When you have a problem with Vula, what do you most often do to get help? 71% ask a friend or another student 14% Ask a lab administrator or lab assistant My overall experience using Vula has been: 96% positive or very positive (42%, 54%)
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19. Exploring innovative uses of learning environments Wikis Simulation games Mashups Project sites Communities Where are we going?
20. Creating collaborative spaces with Wikis Wikis provide scaffolding for students to share information about themselves and contribute to a shared knowledge base
21. The “HETWiki” : History of Economic Thought (3rd year course), created by students working in pairs following a template. Students entries were assessed to form part of the course mark.
22. Simulation games create microworlds for (more) authentic learning experiences Applied International Trade Bargaining 3rd year Economics Course in which student teams role-play countries engaged in WTO negotiations Evolved from WebCT (2005 and earlier), to WebCT (course) + Vula (students) (2006), to Vula with multiple sites (and maybe Facebook?) (2007) Inkundla yeHlabathi / World Forum Online International Law simulation
25. Mashups with Google Maps The Sakai Maps tool creates a mashup between Sakai and Google Maps. In this site, postgraduate History students share the geographic location and other information about primary source documents being studied through the Aluka digital archive.
26. Vula project sites 14% of all Vula sites are project sites created by students. Of those, 49% are created for academic purposes. Project sites are also used by staff, for example for research collaboration. (Survey of Vula project sites, May 07)
27. Student project sites Surveyed active student-created project sites from Feb 06 to May 07 (site title, description, content / tools) to categorise by intention, purpose or activity.
28. From courses to community The SRC site is visited by over 50% of UCT students
29. eLearning in a changing environment Critical mass reached (“everything should be on Vula”) More support and training requirements High-stakes usage (tests, final exams) Demand to “fill in the gaps” in features “We can do X on Vula” (e.g. course evaluations) Potential for deriving greater value from network effects (data analytics / early-warning systems) Rapid innovation in and adoption of Internet services (e.g. Facebook, Google Apps) are redefining end-user expectations and changing application usage patterns The above and more available bandwidth will create demand for better integration with Internet services The “product category” of the LMS is aging and in the process of reinvention (aka. “the LMS is dead, long live the … ?”)
30. What are students using? Institutional services … but also Internet-based services.
